Most of the country thinks CSI stands for "Crime Scene Investigation," as popularized on TV. In a convoluted sort of way, the acronym means something similar in ITIL® v3. This is a stretch, but bear with me.
In v3, CSI stands for Continual Service Improvement and it is the fifth volume of the v3 publication. In the v3 scheme of things, CSI is the culmination of Strategy, Design, Transition, and Operation and is the phase in the service lifecycle that actually is part of all of the previous four phases. But too often, CSI becomes Crime Scene Investigation when we in IT mess up.
On TV, the ensuing activity takes place in Las Vegas, Miami and New York. In this blog, we visit Washington DC...
Recently, the Census Bureau announced that they are abandoning a plan to replace paper and pencil with wireless handheld computers for the 2010 census, a move that will add 3 billion dollars to the cost of conducting the census according to the New York Times in an article entitled "Dust Off the Pencils: Plans for High-Tech Census Collapse." The Washington Post article is entitled Census Back to Pen and Paper. I'm not sure what bothers me more, overlooking industry best practices, the $3 billion, or sharpening all those pencils.
As a student of ITIL, the phase "crime scene" might come to mind when reading the details. I don't want to point fingers or try to second guess the participants based only on a couple of news items, but this is an example of a failure in service management that ITIL good practices are designed to prevent.
Apparently, the problem began in the strategy phase when the requirements for a projected service are formulated based on the strategic goals. I infer from the news reports that the strategic goal of this service was to increase the accuracy and decrease the cost of the census. The strategic plan was a reasonable, even modest, extension of commonly used inventory technology: use GPS enabled handheld computers to record the exact location of each canvassed household and wirelessly transmit the collected data to regional accumulation centers. According to the reports, the requirements for implementing this plan were not thoroughly understood or communicated to the partner who was to supply the devices. As the project proceeded, more and more requirements were added, under-estimates were revealed, and costs ballooned, eventually resulting in the cancellation of plans to implement the service.
It is not clear whether the service ever got beyond the design phase and into transition where it would have been tested and deployed into the production environment, and it certainly never reached the operation.
In the ITIL v3 service lifecycle, CSI plays a role in every phase. Experience with the service in each phase is collected and analyzed to discover ways to improve the service. In the case of a failed service, this is a lot like Crime Scene Investigation, looking for the mistakes made and tracing flaws so that the service can be improved in the future.
Census takers may still use pen and paper in 2010, but if the Census Bureau applies CSI properly, there is a good chance that the 2020 census will be automated.
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