ITIL Best Practices Implementation at Celanese: A Case Study Report

Desklib provides past papers and solved assignments for students. This report analyzes Celanese's ITIL implementation.

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Executive Summary
Celanese is the global leader in chemical manufacturing industry has
faced a lack of communication and integration within its organization. It
used an ERP system to support and manage the processes going in the
department but as soon as the technology advanced and company
progressed further it was found in the HP assessment that they need to
reconfigure their management system so the managers tried to implement
best practices of ITIL in order to manage the IT operations and to
integrate the processes. Several initiatives included implementing
Opsware, operations support model, etc. Managers further took help of
the RACI model to find the ownership of every process, in order to save
time and to solve the client’s problems easily. Some other initiatives taken
in 2009 were Change control management, Service Transition, Service
level management, Process ownership, and Project management. This
implementing ITIL best practice was a major step taken by Celanese.
Keywords: ITIL, Operations support model, Celanese, integration, process.
1. Introduction
The report consists of the processes and functions present at each phase of service
operation in ITIL. Their benefits are discussed in the report. What is the importance
these functions and processes hold in a solution to the problem encountered by
Celanese? As Celanese was facing a lack of communication and integration in the
organization, ITIL best practices needed to be involved in the organization. ITIL’s best
practices led in implementing various tools and models such as Opsware and Operation
support model to carry out the processes effectively. RACI was also adopted by ITIL to
find the ownership of processes. Although OSM was having various benefits but also
said to be bureaucratic because whole processes were depending upon a single person.
Celanese also used TOP desk which is an ITSM tool.
2.1 Processes
Request management is the management of all requests pending regarding a service.
Basically, request management is the part of the help desk where each request is
converted into tickets, similar tickets are combined together and the processing takes
place. Another process involved in the phase of service operations is Access
management and it works by granting authorization to users for accessing IT
applications. These processes are important as IT applications need to control the
access management for unwanted access and without request management clients
cannot be handled appropriately (Steinberg 2011).
ITSM Assignment Report – 2806ICT
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2.2 Functions
The functions performed at several phases of service operation are Service Desk,
Technical Management. Technical management includes identifying the expertise to
manage IT services. Technical managers can also enhance the skills of employees by
creating a training program for them. Service desk has the functionality of providing
necessary tools, skills, and processes in order to maintain and handle incidents and
user’s requests. Being an IT company, the service desk will enable the ITIL to provide
contact between the end user and service providers. Technical management also plays
an important role because to support the IT services specific knowledge related to IT
field is important (Menken, Blokdijk & Malone 2009).
2. My Opinion about Communication and Integration
The above-mentioned functions and processes which are a major part of service
operation in ITIL, do need communication and integration but as the HP assessment
was an eye-opener for Celanese. Because in HP assessment a series of questionnaires
were presented to the different expertise managers to which they had to respond. But
as the assessment detected that the essence of ITIL best practices which were
communication and integration was lacking. All the groups barely knew each other. IT
group was completely unaware of how the IT services and applications were being
provided to their customers by business managers. Not only the overall lack of integrity
came forward in Celanese but also the maturity rating of 2 was given to Celanese. As
the Celanese had gaps in the different teams, it also showed a lack of integration
between processes, lack of management and transparency into their working
environment. The solutions proposed for these problems were also to improve the
internal working of the IT department for which the integration and communication is
the necessary step to implement (Mohamed, Ribière, O'Sullivan & Mohamed 2008). The
functions such as service desk and technical management involve communication
between different processes and functions which will solve the problem of Celanese to a
greater extent (Sheikhpour & Modiri 2012.).
3. ITIL Best Practices’ Contribution or Help
After the HP assessment, the ITIL at Celanese was re-engineered to overcome the
problem like lack of communication and integration. There were a lot of contributions
made by ITIL reengineered process one of which was adding specialists into the
organization to focus on different areas of management such as Change management,
Incident management, and Problem management. All the specialists were assigned the
work of generating reports after managing information required in various processes.
The second step taken by the director of Celanese was to train the employees for ITIL.
The employees were made aware of the benefits and working of ITIL. Also, the
Taskforce was organized by the operations manager to take place once-twice a month in
order to improve IT services. Another contribution took by managers of Celanese was to
implement Opsware which is a network automation system, improving incident
management to classify the problem more appropriately and the implementation of
Operation support model which further depend upon RACI model (Neničková 2011).
4. The RACI Model in the OSM
The RACI model was used in OSM to differentiate among the ownership types and to
clearly define the ownership for each process. RACI model defines ownership of four
types, one is R type which dictates ownership of responsibility. A type indicates
Accountability, which states that this owner will be held accountable for this process. C
type owner indicates that there is two-way communication with them and they are the
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experts. I type owners are informed about the completion of the task (Feltus, Petit &
Dubois 2009).
5. Benefits vs Complexity in the OSM
6.1 Benefits
ITIL encountered a lot of benefits from implementing an operations support model. The
benefit described by the operational manager was that before OSM if any problem used
to occur relating to anything the person used to come to him and used to ask him to fix
it even when the actual owner of that process was someone else. This was used to
create problem into the system but after OSM was implemented the role of each person
was defined using the RACI model. So that when some problem occur they can know
who should be accountable for it and who should take the responsibility of it. Thereby
eliminated finger pointing to everyone and reaching out to the specific person to get the
solution of that problem (Marrone & Kolbe 2011).
6.2 Complexities
However, the most important concern related to OSM model was finding a single
service owner. But the application manager had different opinion quoting the OSM as
bureaucratic because all the decisions were taken by a single developer and he/she was
the only one to hold responsible for any problem that may occur (Wan & Jones 2013).
6. ITSM Tool and Potential Benefits to Celanese
There are various ITSM tools that can be used by Celanese for solving the problem
encountered by them. But as communication was a problem needed to be solved,
Celanese can use TOP desk which is an ITSM tool. As an organization always need to
keep the communication going on in order to keep the customers happy and also all the
team members belonging to the different team can also know each other and
communicate effectively. Hence TOP desk is the best solution because it does not only
enable effective communication but also enables workflow creation, management and
helps in keeping track of the resources. The TOP desk is easy to use and self-informative
tool which can be adapted in every organization easily. The TOP desk also eases the
management work by implementing workflow rules and ensures quality work within an
organization. This tool is used by the most IT-based organizations and also for help desk
ticket handling. This tool will be highly beneficial for Celanese as they have difficulty in
communication between demand, application and infrastructure groups. As the
Celanese group had a problem in internal communication, these tools will make internal
communication better (Matchett, Lord & Bandopadhyay 2015).
7. Reflective Learning Journal
ITIL is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library which defines the set of
practices that needs to be implemented in an IT organization in order to manage the IT
services effectively. As learned from the case study of Celanese, in my opinion, is that
ITIL works best to solve the problem such as lack of communication and integration as
encountered in Celanese. A company cannot just have one ERP system and think of
solving all the organizational problems with it. In an IT organization a lot if IT processes
take place which then comes to business persons in order to further provide these
services and applications to the customers. In the case studied above the IT department
and Management department had little or no knowledge about the other department.
Because of the lack of communication, this problem caused a rating of 2 in performing
ITIL practices. The OSM was also implemented in the company which was disappointing
for some managers, but in my opinion, it was the company’s best implementation. As it
can also be seen from the results and aftereffects of this model being implemented into
Celanese. In my opinion, OSM was beneficial for the company because without it there
were operational inefficiencies and strategic plans were also not executed properly. In
the previous scenario, the roles and responsibilities were not clearly defined which led
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to delays, financial losses, etc. also the lack of interaction between the departments
made the whole working of Celanese worse. Before OSM there was no clear methods
and principles of work, which eventually led enhancements of risks. After OSM was
implemented into the organization it led improvement in the way businesses were
conducted before. Duplication of work also got eliminated to a greater extent. The
whole company was able to take control of the cost, time and processes. The
stakeholders were also getting a benefit because of the way it changed the interaction
between customers and stakeholders by using the RACI model in OSM. OSM provided
better control and management of processes and stakeholders. The coordination among
the individuals and departments also got improved. Hence OSM according to me is very
helpful in scaling the business and helping the organization in communication when the
complexity of business increases. When there will be a clear understanding of roles and
responsibilities, the processes taking place in an organization, it will eventually lead to
better risk management because risk can be analyzed beforehand so that measures can
be taken in order to diminish the risk probability and also to analyze the solution to
prevent those risks. I also learned the importance of service operations in ITIL. The
functions and processes are helpful in the organization to keep the communication
effective because communication is the Key to success whether being communication
within the organization or being with the customers. Service support like incident
management, change management, and problem management, etc. is also an integral
part of an organization as it helps in performing the operations smoothly. There are
ITSM tools also which can be used to solve the communication gap between the
employees such as TOP desk which according to me will be helpful in solving problems
of Celanese (Trusson, Doherty & Hislop 2014). Hence the initiative taken by Celanese
was right and according to me the importance of those initiatives have also been
reflected in the case study.
8. Conclusion
As Celanese was facing a lack of communication and integration in the organization, it
implemented various tools and models such as Opsware and Operation support model to
carry out the processes effectively. The TOP desk is easy to use and self-informative tool
which can be adapted in every organization easily. Hence it should also be adopted by
Celanese to make user no communication gap can exist into the organization.
9. References
Steinberg, L.A., (2011) ITIL Service Operation (Best Management Practices). The
Stationery Office.
Menken, I., Blokdijk, G. and Malone, T., (2009) ITIL V3 MALC-Managing across the
lifecycle of IT services best practices study and implementation guide. Emereo Pty Ltd.
Mohamed, M.S., Ribière, V.M., O'Sullivan, K.J. and Mohamed, M.A., (2008) The re-
structuring of the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) implementation
using knowledge management framework. Vine, 38(3), pp.315-333.
Sheikhpour, R. and Modiri, N., (2012) A best practice approach for integration of ITIL
and ISO/IEC 27001 services for information security management. Indian journal of
science and technology, 5(2), pp. 2170-2176.
Neničková, H., (2011) CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS FOR ITIL BEST PRACTICES
USAGE. Economics & Management, 16.
Feltus, C., Petit, M. and Dubois, E., (2009) Strengthening employee's responsibility to
enhance governance of IT: COBIT RACI chart case study. In Proceedings of the first
ACM workshop on Information security governance, pp. 23-32.
Marrone, M. and Kolbe, L.M., (2011) Uncovering ITIL claims: IT executives’ perception
on benefits and Business-IT alignment. Information Systems and e-Business
Management, 9(3), pp. 363-380.
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Wan, J. and Jones, J.D., (2013) Managing IT service management implementation
complexity: from the perspective of the Warfield version of systems science. Enterprise
Information Systems, 7(4), pp.490-522.
Matchett, C., Lord, K. and Bandopadhyay, T., (2015) Magic Quadrant for IT Service
Support Management Tools. Gartner Inc.
Trusson, C.R., Doherty, N.F. and Hislop, D., (2014) Knowledge sharing using IT service
management tools: conflicting discourses and incompatible practices. Information
Systems Journal, 24(4), pp. 347-371.
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