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by Richard Gamble
Eight
years into its 10-year contract with IBM, Amtrak CIO Bob
Galey knew he had problems last year.
“We had a bad IT outsourcing relationship,” he
admits. “It
had to be one of the early outsourcing contracts and over
time, it had become a bad contract. It was inflexible. The
costs were too high by today’s standards. We lacked
access to some data. Service quality was up and down, but,
in the waning years of the contract, it was mostly down.
Compared to contemporary best-practices outsourcing, we were
way off the mark.”
So Amtrak looked at going to market with an RFP and beginning
the long search for a new provider and a contract that met
contemporary standards.
Instead, it chose to skip the RFP
and negotiate a new contract with IBM. The result was a quicker
fix, Galey says. In April,
Amtrak signed a new contract
that is paying off, he reports.
“We wrote a letter to the head of IBM Global Services, explaining our dissatisfaction
and outlining what we wanted,” he recalls. They responded immediately.
“
Now we have online real-time access to a common database that shows us exactly
how we are doing,” Galey adds. “We have well over 100 service level
agreements that spell out what they will do. We have clauses that adjust the
contract as prices and services change so that we don’t end up overpaying,
like we did under the old contract.”
The lesson he learned is that you
must have a stringent set of metrics and a way to measure how the outsourcer
is performing. “That was a big part of
the problem with our old IBM contract; there was no measurement of how well
they were doing,” he adds.
What sort of performance metrics? For desktop
support, it’s how long it
takes the help desk to respond to inquiries, Galey explains. It’s
the average wait time if you call their call center. It’s how many
problems are resolved in the initial call to the help desks.
For mainframe
operations, it’s response time. “Our reservation system
requires a response within two seconds,” he points out. And it’s
system uptime.
“We have a bunch of terminals that affect revenue.
Having them up all the time and able to respond quickly is more important
to us than response
time for some
of our back office systems. You set the metrics to match your priorities,” Galey
explains.
In the end, staying with Big Blue ended
Amtrak’s big
blues.
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