The SLM Corporation has made a lot of big changes to its business in the past few years, not the least of which is its new approach to IT service and support.
"We have taken literally hundreds of different practices and consolidated them into one practice," says Jo Lee Hayes, vp of enterprise technologies for The SLM Corporation, more commonly known as Sallie Mae, which manages more than $130 billion in student loans and serves 10 million customers.
As it continues its two-year old metamorphosis from being a government-sponsored enterprise, Sallie Mae has spent most of the past year embracing the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, to streamline its tech processes.
ITIL is a series of books that gives guidance on IT services and on the facilities to support a tech structure unified across an enterprise and aligned with a firm's overall strategic goals. Customer interactions, as well as employee use and requests that involve technology-and that's most requests nowadays-fit into a formal "best practices" structure that's efficient and consistent.
As Sallie Mae severed ties with the government and plotted an expansion into consumer loans and home purchase financing, it needed to improve communication between IT silos; at times there was a disconnect between the application development group and the infrastructure and operations group. Additionally, the firm's auditing processes for Sarbanes-Oxley and Statement of Auditing Standards were often more than was required.
Beginning in late 2005, Sallie Mae began rolling in ITIL service support processes with the help of CA Solutions, a consulting and tech firm. "Sallie Mae does a lot of acquisitions, and one of the things that we find is we have diversified processes and a variety of different practices," Hayes says. "The fact that we had these different practices made it virtually impossible to comply with audits. We had to standardize some of those procedures."
The student loan giant began by assigning a process owner and a process manager to each tech function. Hayes says that by defining organizational roles around ITIL, Sallie Mae could promote an ITIL culture that spanned existing IT management silos.
A critical component of the ITIL implementation has been the deployment of the Unicenter Service Desk, the service desk function; the move is aimed at increasing employee productivity and cutting costs by streamlining "help desk" requests. The Unicenter Service Desk helps Sallie Mae automate and integrate incident management processes from detecting and classifying incidents to diagnosing and resolving them. For example, the Unicenter Network and Systems Management automatically opens tickets in the Unicenter Service Desk when system problems occur. The problems are then categorized, and the root-cause of problems are determined to prevent further incidents from occurring. The firm reaped quick benefits from the deployment, reducing the length of help desk calls by 40 percent and improving the rate of first-call resolution to a two-year high.
The result was an improvement in productivity since fewer issues were directed to the more involved, and higher cost, "tier two" support level; more employees found their own answers through self-help tools.
Another part of the project has been integrating change management between the application development group and infrastructure and operations group. The prior disconnect between the two groups had been a sore spot for the firm, since on some occasions the application development group would work on a project without considering the impact on infrastructure components, or Sallie Mae's business processes.
By automating change management, Sallie Mae is now tracking and managing change requests throughout the entire change management cycle, from the initial request through deployment. Hayes says that should provide visibility into the entire spectrum of IT service management. "A change is a change is a change, whether it's a server change or an application change," she says.
Results like those at Sallie Mae have caught the attention of both the tech industry and businesses at large, making ITIL a much sought-after strategy. Forrester Research, for example, says that by the end of 2006, 40 percent of companies with $1 billion or more in revenues will have implemented ITIL, up from 13 percent a year earlier.
But even some of ITIL's strongest advocates warn that implementation itself isn't a holy grail, but a framework for the cultural changes necessary for an enterprise to improve the link be-tween IT and business goals. "Sometimes the view is that ITIL's a silver bullet and you don't have to think about best practices," says Brian Johnson, vp and worldwide ITIL practice manager for CA, who has worked on a dozen ITIL implantations for CA.
