Yahoo's new IT approach: less heroism, fewer burnouts

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September 19, 2007 (Computerworld) -- CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- IT heroes, those workers who are willing to get up at 2 a.m. and drive into work to fix a problem or to spend a weekend in a data center setting up a new system, are a key part of many organizations, including Yahoo Inc.'s corporate IT department.

But if someone is fixing the same problem night after night, that isn't heroism: it's the movie Groundhog Day come to life. And that's the kind of problem that Stephen Carn, Yahoo's manager of data center services, is trying to avoid.

"We do perform heroics all the time; you might not realize it, but it might be just par for the course for the career that you choose," Carn said. He noted, however, that there's a price to pay "in terms of turnover and burnout."

Like many large companies, Yahoo is incorporating new service management practices, such as the ones detailed in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines, into its IT operations. Carn, who started in his current job about 18 months ago, quickly found a way to illustrate to higher-level IT executives how the service management concept works, thanks to an application that kept crashing.

Carn said he asked the IT staff to fill out incident management forms detailing what happened after each crash. He then created a timeline and put the data from the 17 reported incidents into a spreadsheet, with the goal of finding their root causes -- one of the steps that service management processes recommend as a means of improving IT services.

Nine of the crashes were caused by an outdated Dynamic Link Library file, Carn discovered. He said he showed the results of his investigation to senior IT managers and demonstrated the methods he used to track down the application problem, and it "really resonated" with them.

Carn, who outlined the steps that Yahoo is taking to implement its service management program at the IT Service Management Forum USA's Fusion '07 conference here, is working with an IT staff of 400 people that handles about 200,000 help desk requests annually.

Senior executives might have been enthusiastic about adopting service management concepts and incorporating ITIL's recommended practices, but selling the idea to IT staffers required some internal marketing, Carn said. Yahoo dubbed its service management effort ITopia and created handouts, cartoons, T-shirts and even Frisbees to help explain the program and get people interested in it.

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