By Dick Stark

This past week MeriTalk, a government IT think tank presented its first annual Merit Awards, an award: challenging the world to come forth with ideas on how to use IT to improve the quality of government. The first place winner: Aung Gye, Federal Highway Administration, who took home a check for $50,000.

And, last month CIO Magazine presented its annual CIO 100 Awards to the organizations that are the best at using IT to achieve business value.  Both the Merit and CIO Awards honor organizations and individuals with great ideas and the application of these ideas through the strategic use of IT. Other evaluation factors include the ability to affect change through sheer will and innovation, cost reduction, improved customer satisfaction and efficiency.  Following are awardee examples on how IT can be used to push organizations to do more and the role that RightStar and BMC can play.

Aung Gye’s award winning idea is incredibly simple: create a nationwide, interactive database of government resources, from conference space to office equipment and automobiles, to ensure full utilization.  Many government departments/agencies have assets such as automobiles, vans, buses, airplanes, boats, office equipment, office space, meeting rooms, conference facilities, that are not utilized at all times. Aung’s idea is to share the use of these unused assets by developing a centralized nationwide database to see what assets are available during which time frames by department/agency and by location, to match the need of the requestor. The same principles of a CMDB for IT assets can be applied to non-IT assets. BMC’s Atrium CMDB paired up with its Remedy Asset Management module can be set up for acquisition and sharing of any new equipment/services where multiple agencies can reap the benefits. This will maximize the use of the unused assets/services and minimize unnecessary spending of tax payers’ dollars.

One of the CIO 100 Honorees, HealthSouth was profiled because of how rapidly it came back from its days of falsifying financial statements (both its CFO and CIO were given prison sentences).  HealthSouth is an award winner in part because of its use of business analytics to provide 97 rehabilitation hospitals unified data in dozens of categories.  These include labor and therapy productivity, supply-chain expenses, and patient satisfaction.  All told, 97 hospitals are able to compare themselves against each other.

Similar in functionality to BMC’s ITBM modules of Service Costing and Project Portfolio Management, HealthSouth now relies on analytics to improve labor productivity, and measure and increase customer satisfaction.  Analyzed metrics include employees per occupied bed, and cost as a percentage of revenue.  The numbers help decide how to change the way a given facility operates. 

 As an ITSM consultancy, RightStar already works on similar ITSM big ideas ranging from Asset Management to Service Catalog to Capacity Optimization.  What big idea works for your organization?