Tuesday, July 20, 2010
3:55 PM
By Rachel Lebeaux, SearchCIO.com | Jul 17, 2010

Outsourcing IT's infrastructure may prove risky to some CIOs, but infusing the practice with the ITIL framework makes it a bit more bearable.

The Procter & Gamble Co., an $80 billion a year consumer-products company based in Cincinnati, with more than 135,000 employees in 80 countries, has gone through several rounds of IT outsourcing, starting in 2003.

"We were embarking on a fairly rapid global expansion, and we felt like we needed to have the capacity and capability to meet that global expansion and business expansion with IT infrastructure and application capabilities," said Daryl Goetz, Procter & Gamble's global IT Service Management (ITSM)/ITIL manager.

Seven years ago, the company decided to outsource a large portion of its IT organization, including infrastructure, networking and applications. The IT infrastructure outsourcing vendor, Hewlett-Packard Co., in Palo Alto, Calif., also took responsibility for support in those areas, including the replacement of applications and hardware and the development of new products.

Like Procter & Gamble, which launched its ITIL framework in 1997, HP is an ITIL shop, Goetz said, with equivalent levels of maturity.

"We've had a lot of success with ITIL," Goetz said. "It's a good foundation and capability for structurally having clear, defined process."

That same year, Procter & Gamble also outsourced its HR applications to IBM Corp., and its on-site utility work to Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.
"While the [outsourcing to Jones Lang LaSalle] is not unique to IT, it gave us a touch of multivendor," Goetz said. "Obviously, we had to coordinate among all of them."

Foreseeing a further desire to diversify in the future, Procter & Gamble made a strategic decision to reexamine its outsourcing contract with HP after five years. When 2008 rolled around, "we decided that the network portion of that was a key driver to our globalization and our integration capability with our acquisitions, so we decided to look at re-outsourcing that portion to another vendor," Goetz said.

Following a review process, Procter & Gamble chose British Telecom, now BT Group PLC, for its strong ITIL base, success in global networking and cultural similarities between the two companies.

Procter & Gamble's CIO drove the ITIL-aligned multisourcing efforts, assembling a leadership team including the vice presidents of such key IT areas as global databases and infrastructure, a representative from financial services, and the company's employee relationships director, among others.
 
About ICG:
ICG is the only IT service Provider in Hong Kong who has attained International Quality Management Standard ISO9001:2008. ICG adopts ITIL(R) V3 in its daily operation. All operation & sales staff are ITIL(R) qualified. ICG helped many professional firms to instil ITIL culture into their corporate practise. For example, ICG was commissioned to give private training and consultancy to Linklaters, DLA Piper, etc.

Source from:
http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/itil-boosts-infra-outsourcing?src=related

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