Six Sigma and business excellence: Strategic and tactical examination of IT service level management at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer of Washington, DC

During the period January through May 2003 ten teams of student consultants from the Quality Enhancement Systems & Teams (QUEST) Interdisciplinary Honors Program, the Robert H. Smith School of Business and the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland conducted a quality analysis of Information Technology Service Level Management (ITSLM) for the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) of the Government of the District of Columbia. OCTO is largely funded by the United States Congress and is the key IT provider for various public sector agencies in Washington, DC including Metropolitan Police, the Department of Motor Vehicles, Fire and Rescue, Public Works, and DC Public Schools. Five areas of ITSLM were examined through two lenses with a student consulting team assigned to each area and lens. These areas of ITSLM were Availability Management, Capacity Management, Financial Management, Service Continuity, and Service Level Management with Service Continuity essentially referring to ‘disaster recovery’. The two lenses were Six Sigma Strategies and Methods and Business Excellence. Six Sigma is a highly structured approach to process improvement and design while Business Excellence holds to the principles and criteria that are foundational to various international quality awards such as America's Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award or the European Quality Award. In either case, at its most fundamental level, the goal is to advance a public or private sector entity on the path to excellence. While analysis indicated that OCTO is on the path towards making Washington, DC the ‘City of Access’, a number of strategic and tactical improvement suggestions were identified that will further enable OCTO in this endeavor. Presented herein are selected results from applying the two approaches to performance improvement. In all, the results are synergistic, suggesting that the two lenses can be coordinated to accomplish more in conjunction than can either employed in isolation. Projections by OCTO of potential cost-savings resulting from application of selected suggestions range from $2 million to $3 million.