When Mead and Westvaco—the country’s two largest forest products and packaging companies at the time—merged in early 2002, Jim McGrane, then the vice president of process development at Mead, was promoted to CIO and assigned the unenviable task of standardizing the new entity—$7.2 billion MeadWestvaco—on a single SAP system. McGrane had started redesigning Mead’s order management and financial processes four years earlier, so it was natural this new job would fall to him. But something about the project didn’t sit right. Even though he was standardizing the processes the business would follow and providing users with a system that would enforce these new, more efficient processes, his own department was continuing to operate the same way it always had, following what was basically a collection of ad hoc practices. "There was no focus on process for IT," says McGrane. The contradiction was obvious: The group responsible for developing and enforcing a set of common business processes didn’t have a process of its own. Consequently, the IT department wouldn’t be able to hold itself to the same standards it was applying to the rest of the organization.

McGrane and his senior staff spent the better part of 2002 coming to grips with this disconnect by developing a vision for the future of the IT department and figuring out what core processes it needed to get there. McGrane wanted a lean department, one that could anticipate and solve problems before they happened and adapt to changes in the business as quickly as the business itself changed. The team started with the governance frameworks available but invariably hit a wall. "We would look at stuff from Gartner and IBM and other places, but it was never at the level of something you could implement," McGrane says. "They would give you a description like ’availability management.’ But [they] never really said what these terms were."

Then one of McGrane’s staffers discovered the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a collection of best practices for IT operations first developed by the British government 20 years ago. It differed from the other process frameworks they had found: It was high-level but had enough detail to make the meaning of each term clear and show how it could be applied to an organization. Intrigued, McGrane bought 10 copies (ITIL is available only as a set of books or CD-ROMs) and he and his team read them over the December holidays. At the end of the first quarter of 2003, McGrane formalized a plan to rebuild his IT department using the ITIL framework. Although MeadWestvaco’s transformation is still ongoing, to date the company has eliminated more than $100,000 annually in IT maintenance contracts and recognized a 10 percent gain in operational stability. McGrane credits these gains and savings to ITIL.