ANSTO doubles its IT innovation budget thanks to ITIL

Upon taking up his role as CIO at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) in October 2006, Michael Beckett was faced with a major image problem.

Within ANSTO, the perception of IT was that of a ‘can’t do’ organisation, known for being unresponsive and an inhibitor to the business, according to Beckett, who presented this week on ANSTO’s ITIL deployment at the SAP Australian User Group conference.

“The perception from customers, users and the business was that we didn’t deliver value, the help and support they needed, or the reliability of the services,” he says. “IT was seen as a barrier, so we had to initiate cultural change so that when the business came to IT it didn’t say no. Instead it finds a way to support the business, get what you need done, while still respecting the rules we have.”

Turning IT around required a framework, specifically an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, to bring about positive change.

For the detailed breakdown of ANSTO’s ITIL benefits see CIO’s January story.

Since deploying ITIL, the organisation’s 80/20 ratio of maintenance/innovation IT spend has been reworked to get close to 60/40 — with the prospect of an even better ratio in the future.

“Two years later I now have a cap-ex book worth $25 million I’m working my way through,” he says. “Management now wants us to deliver very large scale transformation projects.”

These include an SAP upgrade to facilitate end-to-end business processes automation, a business-wide network restructure to move to a private cloud-based environment for its 1000-plus users, and a fleet management approach to manage IT refreshes to ease the operational costs of its systems.

“We’re also looking to strategically mange 40-50 years of scientific data, 70 years of medical data, as well as the tacit knowledge of what’s in our research staff’s head, so a knowledge management project is also a priority,” Beckett says.

Click here to view Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) CIO Michael Beckett’s tips on deploying ITIL.