3 Keys to a Successful IT Transformation: What I Learned at the IRS

Leading a successful IT transformation at a large institution like the Internal Revenue Service, the focus of the final five years of my government career, is a complex, difficult task, but not impossible. It’s a rewarding journey full of ups and downs that requires patience, persistence, resilience, coalition building, and consistency.

When we first started, the needs were many: we had no comprehensive monitoring system; tools were purchased but there was no integration strategy; and our CTO was often stopped in the halls by business executives and commissioners being informed that critical business systems were down.

Our goal was to ensure optimal availability of IT Services for our customers through the use of processes and technology that provided end-to-end monitoring (i.e. visibility of applications up and down the stack), and auto-ticketing of critical systems and infrastructure components.

Our focus was to better understand how our systems and infrastructure were operating to proactively prevent outages, or quickly alert the right teams to speed up service restoration. We worked hard to deploy, integrate, and maintain a suite of ITSM tools that not only support our event, incident and problem management processes, but also our configuration, change, asset, and knowledge management processes.

The journey is not complete, but in a period of five years…

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