ITIL: Key to this Government Agency's Decision to Stop Outsourcing

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    Two years ago, the State Revenue Office in Victoria, Australia decided not to renew its IT outsourcing contract — which was nearing the seven-year mark.

    In ZDNet Australia’s Government agency claims ITIL first,” reporter Steven Deare quotes corporate services executive director Tony Whelan as saying that “cost control” was the reason the agency chose to walk away from outsourcing and rebuild its internal IT organization. That process involved hiring 25 new people for the IT staff, which now numbers 32.IT takes up about 25% of the agency’s budget. According to the article, the service provider was unable to meet the agency's revised budget for desktop maintenance, which involved supporting 450 PCs.

    Why do I bring this up if it was two years that the agency got out of its outsourcing track? Because a lot of the success of the internal IT effort can be due to its efforts to certify on ITIL. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, the office became the first government agency to have its internal IT services certified to BS15000/AS8018, also known as ITIL Certification (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).

    According to this Australian IT article by Kelly Mills, since the re-sourcing or insourcing began, costs have dropped about 20% — most of that in the area of development work. That includes an upgrade to the office’s core revenue management system.

    In this press release, Commissioner of State Revenue, Paul Broderick, said, "We have a corporate goal to build the best small IT shop in government. ITIL Certification goes a long way to taking us there. ITIL was adopted as the model to guide our in-sourcing of infrastructure and application services. Achieving Certification is the culmination of that process."

    It’s not ITIL that’s necessarily the secret to success in delivering excellent services. The secret is having a process in place and working to plan at every step. That takes management leadership and vision.

    To learn more about ITIL, go here.