ITIL: Service measures, breaking with tradition
HMRC's IT division needed to merge measures within 15 months.
By Roger Appleby, MISM Live Services, information management solutions, HM Revenue & Customs | Published 07:00, 12 November 07
Contributed by itSMF
At a glance
HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) was formed following the merger of Inland Revenue and HM Customs and Excise Departments. It has over 100,000 staff and computers, 800 buildings, managing £405bn of receipts, £17bn of payments and runs on a £4.5bn budget.
Information management solutions (IMS) was set up to look after the IT requirements for the whole of the HMRC business, and to provide an approach to unify the measures across the new department.
The outsourcing firms on the project also use ITIL as a management process, understanding and using the same terminology is a huge bonus to the speed in which the project moves forward overall.
From any perspective, HMRC is a very big business with more than 100,000 staff and computers, 800 buildings spread across 200 sites, managing £405bn of receipts, £17bn of payments and run on a £4.5bn budget. To give an idea of the scale of HMRC customer contact per year we receive 28 million letters, 33 million calls, and have one million visitors.
Information management solutions (IMS) was set up to look after the IT requirements for the whole of the HMRC business.
Historically the two IT operations had different approaches. In 1994, the Inland Revenue (IR) outsourced its IT data centre operation of services, development of code and most of its IT to EDS. When the contract was re-tendered by IR, the offer from Cap Gemini, with Fujitsu and BT, won. In July 2004 they were awarded the contract.
In contrast HM Customs & Excise’s had a different approach where they had only outsourced the IT infrastructure management with Fujitsu’s Infrastructure Service Agreement (ISA). Fujitsu were responsible for operations but key applications development and maintenance were retained in house. This meant there were two very different approaches to IT outsourced agreements and types of measurements.
