User satisfaction levels at the city of Chicago in the US are up 29% after it outsourced its distributed IT infrastructure to Unisys and its data centre to Acxiom.
This follows a survey conducted by consultancy firm Gartner in 1999, prior to the outsourcing agreement, that showed user satisfaction levels to be less than satisfactory, scoring 2.87 on a scale of 5, against an industry average of 3.56.
"We have restrictions on the salaries the city can pay to qualified technicians and the number of management staff we can hire to support them," says Chris O`Brien, CIO for the city of Chicago.
In 1999 city of Chicago mayor Richard Daley promoted a general direction to outsource non-strategic services. Combined with the results of the initial Gartner survey, the city went out to tender for outsource partners.
Acxiom was awarded complete responsibility for the mainframe outsourcing and its related tape and disk storage subsystems, batch and online application management, database support and change management. Unisys took over the helpdesk, desktop and network management, including desktop configuration and staging, asset management, maintenance, remote network management, end-user help desk and desktop training services. This meant that Unisys assumed responsibility for direct contact with the more than 30 000 internal end-users within the city`s infrastructure.
"No city as large as Chicago had committed to outsourcing at the time, so it was a significant deal from that perspective," says Geoff Tuck, managed services director at Unisys Africa. "It put us and Acxiom under a lot of pressure too, because the mayor insisted that we control costs."
Before going live Unisys established a single-point-of-contact helpdesk that received all problems or service requests. The desk opens a ticket when requests are received and is responsible for resolving the issue. It routes requests to the appropriately skilled person and tracks all requests to ensure they are resolved.
"The desk is offsite so we placed a number of technical staff onsite to provide the desktop, network and application server support. Unisys also had a programme management office tasked with managing its onsite staff," says Tuck.
Acxiom designed a phased approach to migrate the city`s data centre services to its suburban Chicago site.
"During the 18 months the service has been in place, each user has been surveyed independently by Gartner and the results show that 80% are extremely satisfied or satisfied with the services," says Tuck.
A follow-up benchmark study was also commissioned to compare performance metrics with peer organisations, best-practice firms and other outsourcing services. Results show the cost to the city is less than the peer average.
"Prior to the outsourcing agreement I spent 20% to 30% of my time addressing end-user complaints, but now I get less than one a month. My permanent staff are now free to focus on strategic issues, leaving tactical problems to the outsource partners," says O`Brien.
O`Brien adds that the key points to a successful outsourcing venture are:
* Set reasonable expectations and don`t sell outsourcing services as a panacea that will fix all problems quickly. Understand that it may take 18 months to see any real benefits;
* Develop strength around vendor contract management, understanding that remaining permanent staff will need different skills to manage contracts as opposed to employees;
* Incorporate end-users in the process from the beginning and expect resistance to the change;
* Vendor onsite project management will make the change easier; Service level agreements must be focused on time, cost and quality, such as closed call time, end-user satisfaction and network or application performance;
* Contracts must be gain-sharing-based;
* It is essential that top executives be committed to the outsourcing programme, ensuring enterprise cooperation; and
* Choose vendors that will be long-term partners, because if they are not committed to working with you as a partner, the relationship will quickly become inflexible and stagnate.
"The successful experience of the city of Chicago illustrates that when a client and a service provider make a concerted effort to work together the final results are satisfied end-users and a beneficial outsourcing relationship," O`Brien says.
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