ANSTO gets positive reaction from ITIL implementation

The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) has implemented an award-winning Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) deployment to improve internal IT service and performance.

The organisation uses IT principally as a tool to assist with experiments in its nuclear reactor and not as a revenue-generator, although it is also used in finance, accounting and communication operations.

ANSTO delivers specialised advice, scientific services and products to government, industry, and research organizations. It also houses Australia's only nuclear rector and the third of its kind in the world, OPAL, which is used for research and nuclear medicine production.

ANSTO information services manager Mike Beckett heads-up a team of 55 IT staff who work separate to the organisation’s 10 support crew who assist scientific operations. Its networks are similarly divided between 'corporate' operations and the reactor, which has its own IT instruments and requirements, spread over an 11 hectare campus with two main sites and a separate Sydney office at the Medical Cyclotron at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.

"The thrust of the exercise is to turn the IT group around so we focus on the user needs and the business requirements," Beckett said.

"We started on the strategic issues common to IT and now we are moving to the deep-seated difficult areas like configuration and release management.

"We can, to an extent, use templates from the UK government (which created ITIL) and we have had really good results [because] the problems like broken processes and a lack of knowledge are common to IT shops."

The change to ITIL was readily accepted by staff, Beckett said, because many IT processes were previously broken, although a comprehensive IT strategy was already in place which wiped some 10 months from the deployment timeline. The new framework was sold to staff as something to add to portfolios and management encouraged employees to undertake further studies in process management.

Performance levels and expectations are defined in service level agreements and compared to external benchmarks. Beckett said external benchmarks, crucial to maintain a high service delivery, were obtained from various industry sources including the Australian Government Information Management Office which assisted with its telecommunications and Microsoft licence agreements.

Beckett, who has previous ITIL experience in government IT shops, recruited an ITIL expert to assist with deployment timelines in what he describes as "the best money we have spent".

The ITIL version 2 deployment is a phased roll out, which began with a focus on end users including service, problem and incident management, and followed with capacity and availability management.

Release and configuration management will be rolled out this year as the organisation moves to ITIL version 3, during which time Beckett and his team will centralise all software within the IT department and deploy its monitoring platform to establish the licence profiles of each of the 1200 PCs, Macs and Linux-based devices.

Software licences covering about 150 applications have been extracted from business units and centralised within a database held by the IT service desk. Expired and unused licences, many which have been converted for multi-user and enterprise usage, can now be tracked within the database.

"Much of this work is low-hanging fruit, but you need to get on to them," Beckett said, adding it has recently reviewed its SAP contract for maintenance and support.

ANSTO has cut desktop hardware and service costs in half through a combination of data centre , which Beckett said has shaved 20 percent off hardware costs, and re-jigging license agreements.

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