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What were some of the key challenges faced by Lucent in meeting Sarbanes-Oxley certification requirements? Why?
The challenge was to transform IT globally to comply with SOX 2002 certification requirements in a short timeframe. This was a common concern for all CIOs at the time ? how to gain visibility to process controls on a global level while meeting Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
The transition plan for an organization as large as ours was complex, involving thousands of people across multiple time zones and languages, and the timeframe was
extremely short. We knew we needed strong executive sponsorship, and a dedicated team to drive to aggressive milestones to meet regulatory deadlines.
What were some of the key organizational issues that influenced Lucent's global IT transformation?
Lucent needed to adjust the entire organization to changing business requirements, while continuing to provide 24x7 support to a global workforce of more than 35,000 employees. We needed to bring together disparate global processes, in a heterogeneous environment, with hundreds of applications, thousands of servers, and a variety of support models, all in less than a year.
A major challenge was to get our people to adopt dramatically different processes and best-practice models, while maintaining day-to-day operations. It was really hard to strike the right balance and make the trade-offs to keep moving forward.The critical word was balance.
How did you successfully address resistance to change?
We sought to gain support from strong influencers within each organization, sharing with them the business case and getting their buy-in so they could head off resistance to the changes.
We also received tremendous support from the CFO and CEO. Early executive sponsorship was key. We articulated frequently to them the benefits of the automated project and compared the outcomes to the previous manual processes, highlighting the improvements. Frequent reviews with the management team increased executive mindshare for the project.
Continuous communication to staff during the 11 months, as we made changes, was important. We went back to our influencers and supporters to ask: Did you know that (because of the new technology) we see this kind of trend going on in the application environment that can now be proactively addressed? This enabled us to emphasize clear benefits to offset the transformation pain.
This project will stand as an example for future IT transformations.
In sum, what were the key HP differentiators that resulted in a successful deployment and Lucent's business/IT alignment?
HP provided a solution with an architecture built on ITIL. Not only were processes pre-defined, but also tools were set up in advance. HP provided a best-practices IT Service Management deployment model and the consulting expertise to implement a full solution.
We did take the opportunity to invest in software (HP OpenView Service Desk and HP OpenView Operations) that provided quite a bit of benefit post-SOX. HP OpenView gave us an important capability for a global company ? to have all of our systems, applications, and processes recorded in a common configuration management database, which helps us better manage our global IT environment and gives us visibility that we didn't have before.
Can you share some success secrets for implementing change in a large global organization such as yours?
If you believe you need to do it, invest wisely in the right leadership team and build a business case for the right level of funding. Get people aligned and trained. Don't underestimate the need for supporters both in management and within the IT user community.
Don't think you are ever done, because it's a learning process. IT transformation is a journey.
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