When the company recently integrated TeamTrack with Salesforce.com, integration was done by business analysts in partnership with IT, Breakstone says. But the business side isn’t encroaching on IT’s territory as much as the techies are reaching out toward business.

“The old model of throwing requirements over the transom to IT is gone,” says Breakstone. “Instead of talking in technology nomenclature, the conversation is more about business requirements and end-user needs. More than anything this change has empowered IT, bringing it closer to the business and to end-users.”

Getting a grip on managing change:
Mary Kay puts on a new face on internal processes

With five regional U.S. offices, 34 international locations, 1.6 million independent consultants, and three discrete internal IT organizations, Mary Kay had a lot of different ways to get things done. And that, says technology leader Steve Moore, was a challenge.

“Three or four years ago, we were disparate in the way we handled data operations,” Moore says. “We spoke different languages and used different systems to do the same things.” That in turn led to duplicated efforts and inefficiency.

That’s when the $2.2 billion skin-care manufacturer began to adopt a BSM (business service management) practice using BMC’s Remedy suite and ITIL to standardize its internal processes. It began by implementing BMC Remedy Service Desk to create a standard ticketing system for handling and monitoring events and service requests. In the past, Moore says, many requests were made on an ad hoc basis, via e-mail or face-to-face meetings.

“A lot of deals were done in the hallway,” he says. “We didn’t have a centralized service-request system, and when your requests are done via conversation or e-mail, it’s hard to report and even harder to measure. Now when people walk down the hallway and say, ‘You need to change something in Exchange,’ we tell them they need to put a ticket in. For the first time, we were able to measure the work our IT people did in supporting the organization.”

About a year after implementing the service desk, Mary Kay added BMC’s asset- and change-management products, built around BMC’s Atrium CMDB (Configuration Management Database). The CMDB integrates with automated discovery tools and databases throughout the organization, acting as a central clearinghouse for information on all of Mary Kay’s IT assets.

Because the firm leases all of its equipment on two-year lifecycles, getting an accurate view of its assets has been a challenge, Moore says. Though the company’s CMDB is still a work in progress, Moore says the system has given the company the ability to see a lot of what IT manages in a single place.

Adopting centralized systems also allowed Mary Kay’s Dallas headquarters to become an IT service organization for its five regional offices and some international offices, many of which lack internal IT personnel.

Moore says the biggest hurdles have been overcoming users’ resistance to change, educating them about ITIL best practices, and convincing IT personnel that they’re more than mere order takers for the rest of the organization. The company had to sell them on the benefits of standardization — such as the ability to prioritize service requests and free up IT from day-to-day operations for work that’s both more interesting and more vital to the company’s bottom line.

“In the past, IT was viewed as the guys in the basement that you have to deal with,” he says. “Now we’re reaching out and providing better solutions to the business. We used to think like we’re a mom-and-pop shop; now we’re thinking like a global shop. IT had to turn the corner on that mentality, and through consolidation, education, and standardization, we did.”