The purpose for this case study is to illustrate the testing process used for the ITIL Service Manager examination. This illustration is more brief than the case study you are likely to receive when you apply for the examination.

A Case Study

A large oil company named Unified recently relocated their primary data processing center from Los Angeles to Phoenix. Rather than move all of the servers they bought new blade servers and executed a series of fail-overs so that the primary systems are now in Phoenix. The older systems were left in Los Angeles and that data center will become a disaster recovery center for the company.

Many of the employees in Los Angeles have been with Unified for more than twenty years and there is apprehension about whether or not Unified will keep them or lay them off. Many of these employees came to work at Unified when the only system in the data center was a mainframe. Since those days these employees have learned to work with UNIX and Windows software. Most were eagerly looking forward to an opportunity to work on the new blade servers.

Unified management has not always been pleased with the results from their data processing teams. When there was one large mainframe it was difficult to make changes. When the business requested an update, it always took longer than expected and cost more than was budgeted. The migration from the mainframe began when one department manager decided that it was cheaper to buy a computer and hire contract programmers than it was to continue to pay the monthly allocation he was charged for using the mainframe. Soon other managers followed that example. Some of those managers realized that there were talented people working on the mainframe and they brought some of those people into their departments to support these new systems and new applications. This trend continued for several years.

About five years ago a new CIO came to Unified. He looked at the dispersant systems, duplicated projects and excessive fees paid to consultants and began a major effort to consolidate systems back into the central data processing organization. There was considerable opposition to that move and few of the business managers agreed to migrate their applications over to the central IT organization. With the move to Phoenix all of that has changed. Only employees from the central IT organization are allowed administrative access to the new servers. While application development is still managed by the business managers, application updates must go through the new change management process. Only the members of the central IT organization can move code from the development environments over to the production environments in Phoenix.

In addition to the two main data centers in Phoenix and Los Angeles, each refinery has an independent IT organization. These groups have evolved over the years and now support between thirty to over one hundred personal computers along with email servers and file servers within each refinery. The new CIO has repeatedly asked the board of directors to grant him authority to manage these remote IT organizations. While the board of directors is in favor of consistency in process they have not yet taken action to initiate this organizational change. Today the IT employees in each refinery continue to take orders from the vice president responsible for that refinery. And the money to pay their salaries comes out of the refinery budget. The largest of those refineries is in Plano. Additional refineries are located in Pasadena, Pittsburgh and Podunk.

The CIO is in a bind over this situation. Whenever there is an interruption in service, the refinery managers blame the central IT organization. But the CIO does not have the authority to manage the IT employees within those locations. These situations are frequently escalated to the CEO and have been discussed in board meetings. The CEO is eligible for a large bonus based on the performance of the refineries and the Vice President for each refinery is eligible for a bonus that is equivalent to the annual salary if they achieve production, sales and profitability goals. The CIO is also in a bonus pool that is tied to the results from the refineries.

Last year the CIO brought in a group of consultants to find ways to increase reliability of the systems deployed within the refineries. Those consultants recommended converting all of the systems in the refineries from Windows to Linux. The CIO asked another consulting group for an opinion and they recommended converting the Linux servers to Windows. The CIO considered this advice and thought it best to not make any changes as this would certainly create more outages and require additional training. Even so, several of the refinery managers decided to act on the consultant's recommendation and they have been slowly converting key applications from Windows to Linux.

This conversion worries the CIO. In the past Unified Oil has suffered outages when major systems were damaged. The CIO is proud of the work that went into creating a fail over site for the corporate systems and feels that the refinery Vice Presidents should do the same. This issue came up in a recent board meeting and the CIO again asked for authority to manage the IT staff within the refineries. Again, however, the board decided to give the refinery Vice Presidents an opportunity to first demonstrate their resourcefulness. In response, the refinery Vice Presidents hired a consulting group to prepare a disaster recovery plan for each refinery. Their goal is to leverage the fact that each refinery runs a similar set of software applications on similar hardware.

From the point of view of the CIO all of this effort at converting operating systems is distracting the company from focusing on a critical business need. All of Unified Oil's major competitors now have an online web based portal so that the oil distributors that buy refined products can place their orders in advance. This gives those customers confidence that their price is locked in and will not climb unexpectedly. This also gives those competing refineries an advantage because they are better able to plan production so as to minimize shortages and overages that often occur in the refinery business. One of Unified's largest competitors has gone so far as to announce a goal of achieving just-in-time, zero inventory processing within five years.

When that announcement showed up on the front page of one of the trade journals, the CEO called the CIO and told him to select a vendor and start building a web portal immediately. This is going to be a major initiative and any delays are likely to increase the tensions between the different parts of the organization.

The CIO, realizing that there is a gap between what is expected and what the resources in the newly formed central IT organization are prepared for has asked your advice and is searching for a unifying framework to improve overall operational efficiency. He is interested in ITIL and wants to explore each of the disciplines when the right opportunity arises.