by Elizabeth Ferrarini

Governance. Quality initiatives. Proven technologies. All of these things have a high priority at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest and the most successful business and IT consulting firms in the world. The company employees 15,000 employees and has revenues exceeding $2.7 billion. Areas of consulting to the world's largest organizations and government agencies include strategy, organization, operations, systems, and technology.

Enterpriseleadership.org sat down Booz Allen's Daniel M. Gasparro, the firm's chief technologist who is responsible the IT governance model and IT plan and related budget. Here's what he had to say.

EL: Describe your IT organization?

DG: Our IT staff includes 210 employees and 50 subcontractors who maintain our Help Desk and telephone systems. We have networks reaching six continents in 100 different countries where we have offices. Our connectivity services range from virtual private network (VPN), to multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), to services to connect them. As a consulting firm, we deal exclusively in intellectual property, so, to this end, we've got an extensive collaboration capability based on Microsoft's SharePoint. This system includes a knowledge management component and project management capabilities. PeopleSoft drives our human resource system, and we have a combination of financial systems for our government and our commercial sector.

EL: Your folks went to MPLS in 2004. What has been the bottom line benefit, and in what applications have you seen performance improvements?

DG: We've derived a cost benefit based on the ability to increase bandwidth without having to spend more to get it. We're getting more megabytes per dollar. For example, we've been able to double our bandwidth in some locations without increasing the cost to the firm. Because of MLPS, we've been able to add another layer of service capabilities through the Cisco routers. We can now rank applications based on priorities to the business; for example, financial transactions at certain periods of the month take priority over other applications. And, we're now putting applications in the appropriate business classes based on levels of reports.

EL: What is your governance model, and how does it work to benefit  the business units?

DG: It's comprised of a steering committee with senior members from both our commercial and government businesses. Customer councils support this committee by providing accurate and reflective business information in our IT supply and delivery. These customer councils consists of two groups: (1) the administrative systems council focuses on all of the IT professionals who run business systems, such as human resources and finance, as well as the business owners; and (2) the client technology council includes business unit professionals who study how the firm can market more competitive services.

EL: Can you go into more detail about the role of each  council?

DG: The administrative systems council devises the business case and the strategy to carry it out. This group takes their business capability and mirrors it together with business plans. The CFO who chairs this council takes the business plan to the IT Steering committee

The members of the client technology council harness a way to drive our own strategy to become more competitive. For example, this group discussed the features that our collaboration software needed in order to leapfrog the competition.

EL: Given the IT nature of your business, can you tell me how you've used IT to make your clients more competitive? Are there any examples that stand out?

DG: Our investment in our new collaboration architecture is a good example. First, we replaced the infrastructure, such as email. We're now in phase two, which includes replacing our old collaboration systems with a tool that can help us revise our IT governance approach.

EL: I read that you've put off moving to Voice over IP (VoIP).  Why?

DG: Most of our business doesn't involve a network. Many of our employees spend the majority of their time at client locations. A study of our traffic patterns showed that VoIP provided us with no real advantage. On the other hand, we're exploring the potential use of public VoIP services, which could provide our client staff with an advantage when they are working in international locations. However, our employees who tried one of these services said it wasn't yet ready as a business-class service, and that it also had some security issues.

EL: Within IT or within your consulting practice, do you have any  particular quality programs that you use more than others?

DG: We're in the early stages of deploying the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). We put the Service Desk in place in 1997, and initiated Change Management in 1999. We're planning to carry out Incident Management and Configuration Management, and our plan also includes expanding the Service Desk to include more infrastructure capabilities, including televideo.

Our Service Desk and Change Management runs on packages from Vanta, a company owned by PeopleSoft. We're going to be using a package from Telelogic for the other initiatives.

This approach isn't my ideal long-term architecture because the Service Desk and Change Management have to be linked. Both also have to be driven by different business requirements.

EL: Based on the consulting work you've done, do you have an idea  where the Fortune 500 stand with the adoption of ITIL?

DG: Hewlett Packard is the only company we know of that has integrated all ten of the ITIL processes, and we've found that one third of Fortune 500 have started to carry out some of the ITIL processes. Another third of the Fortune 500 companies are examining how to approach ITIL. However, the ten percent that has been doing something with ITIL hasn't been following the ITIL framework very religiously.

In looking at ITIL, many companies evaluate how they use it to carry out processes around lifecycle management. Most organizations, on the other hand, have three basic functional groups: planning, integration, and operations. ITIL is about putting in a supply-and-demand framework to align to the business. If you throw an integrated process across those functional teams, the nature of the IT organization will resist the integration process and bring Change Management to the forefront. As a result, we're looking at a phased approach to ITIL because Change Management is going to be major problem.

EL: As you go further into ITIL, will you have to make any changes to  IT employee skill sets?

DG: We're looking at realigning the careers of many of our IT employees. Many employees have functional certifications in areas such as Cisco. We want more of our employees to have process certifications in areas, such as ITIL, rather than functional certifications.

EL: Any comments on Nicholas Carr's book, Does IT Matter?,  or his Harvard Business Review article, "IT Doesn't Matter"?

DG: I wrote an article called "Evolving Toward a  Services-based Organization" for Network magazine, in response to his article. Carr failed to discuss the nature of the dialog between IT and the business units. Ten years ago, the dialog between the two focused on how IT could help the company achieve a competitive advantage. Today, we talk about IT as an enabler.

How do you engage IT in a productive dialog with the business units? Quality measures, such as ITIL, stress a governance model that aligns with the business demands and IT. The governance model is the forum for IT to have a discussion with the business.

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Elizabeth Ferrarini is an IT consultant from Boston,  Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.