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Closing Gaps in IT Service Delivery

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Jul 11, 2024

Closing Gaps in IT Service Delivery

James Rountree

Written by James Rountree

Category: IT Strategy & Implementation

Healthcare IT departments consistently work to deliver and optimize IT services by implementing current industry best practices. Changes in technology, available budget, skillsets, and environment complexity make this a never-ending challenge. Some of the key areas that help to maintain stable and reliable IT services include cybersecurity, project management, incident management, and change management. These key areas help support IT service design, deployment, operation, and retirement. However, even when good tools are implemented, and when cultural change is succeeding, there are still gaps. Two critical components for successful IT service delivery are 1) an accurate inventory of all service delivery components, and 2) as-built documentation.

“As-built documentation” is a set of well-maintained documents that provide the components, capacity, configuration, and most importantly, the process needed to restore a production environment that has been destroyed electronically (e.g., ransomware) or physically (e.g., fire, water, or natural event).

The inventory, referred to as the CMDB (configuration management database), is rarely inclusive and often fails to be updated after purchasing or end-of-life events. Individual IT teams will maintain detailed documentation in an informal format, but they rarely share it with other teams. Even when good conceptual documentation and dependency mappings exist and are shared, they are typically outdated. To transform your organization’s IT service delivery environment, these two foundational areas must be established as accurate sources of truth.

Several complications must be considered. IT environments are continuously changing and often expanding. Healthcare employees require 24/7 access to IT services to do their jobs. New technologies like public cloud and AI are becoming readily available and are increasing expectations for the IT department to deliver highly automated and universally available services. In addition, remote work has created new issues, especially for identity and access management. These challenges increase the difficulty of maintaining robust foundational IT service delivery through an accurate inventory and as-built documentation.

 

 

How to Close the IT Service Delivery Gaps:

1. Accurate Inventory

  • Purchase a purpose-built quality solution to gather, maintain, and provide inventory reporting.
  • Be careful when adopting automation, which can increase complexity, especially for unvalidated data.
  • Provide ongoing end-user training. IT staff should have a strong understanding of the inventory software.
  • Assign clear ownership for each inventory item to a specific person, including end users.
  • Distribute monthly reports showing a list of assigned inventory items so owners can confirm accuracy and help proactively resolve any discrepancies.
  • Maintain an independent auditing process, using techniques like sample-based audits and an “ABC analysis.” Sample audits pull a small sample of random inventory items to be individually validated for accuracy. An “ABC analysis” divides inventory items into three categories: A (very important), B (moderately important), and C (less important), pulling larger audit samples for the more important components

2. As Built Documentation

  • Create a central repository for documentation that is easily accessible by IT leadership to support IT service management processes (cybersecurity, project, incident, and change management).
  • Create conceptual diagrams and high-level informational documentation for each IT service delivery item in the production environment that includes dependency mapping information.
  • Establish naming and editorial standards to make diagrams and documents more uniform.
  • Develop dependency mapping diagrams to improve planning and support resolving outages. These can be especially helpful for incident response during a cybersecurity or disaster recovery event.

The Bottom Line

Hospital and health system CIOs need to deliver IT services quickly and effectively. When inventories and documentation are inaccurate or missing, coordination and management of services are significantly impacted. To close gaps in your organization’s inventories and production environment as-built documentation, ensure that:

  • Inventory items and documentation have owners who are responsible for validating that they are accurate and complete.
  • Auditing has become a mandatory tool for measuring your success in accurately maintaining an inventory and production documentation.
  • Inventories and production as-built documentation are maintained in a centralized, readily accessible repository that provides the ability to track and report on life cycle.

The Impact Advisors Difference

Is Your Organization Ready to Close the Gaps in your IT Service Delivery?

  • Do you have a well-documented plan for getting foundational components of your IT organization running accurately and efficiently?
  • Do you proactively train your IT staff to understand that keeping accurate records can dramatically reduce the cost of delivering IT services?
  • Are you proactively auditing your inventories and documentation to create sources of truth?

Impact Advisors provides industry-leading expertise to help you close gaps in IT service delivery. We can help you understand – and minimize – your gaps while also helping you develop life cycle management as a key part of managing IT services.