Danone on health kick with Itil

Danone has improved the management and development of its IT infrastructure after implementing an IT infrastructure library (Itil) framework.

Until a few years ago, the food manufacturer operated a fairly localised IT and support infrastructure where processes varied significantly across the organisation.

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Speaking to silicon.com, Danone CIO for Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, Michael Kollig, said: "We realised that this was something which couldn't carry us into the future and we started to roll out a couple of corporate initiatives, the most important one of these being our global SAP implementation."

Danone therefore decided to harmonise its IT across the organisation to make it run more efficiently as well as making it easier to manage and develop.

Kollig added: "For the harmonisation of processes it became clear relatively quickly that the best approach there was Itil. We got something that we were pretty sure would work from day one."

The company worked with software company BMC and used its IT Service Management application to make the implementation as smooth as possible. Danone estimates this significantly reduced the time needed for the project.

The BMC technology ensured that best practice was used to support the project which was known internally as Common Language for the IT Organisation (Clio).

Danone also worked with IT services company InfraVision with the integration.

According to Danone, the Itil implementation will now help increase the accountability and visibility of its IT departments.

Kollig said challenges around the implementation were more cultural than technological. "Most challenges lay in the area of change management. So trying to convince people that they should change their way of doing things, trying to make them understand the benefits of this new approach - that proved to be the biggest challenge."

He added: "Of course you stumble over certain technological challenges but in hindsight if you compare them to the change management challenges they were small."

But Kollig said the effort was worth it. "It's basically going to put our whole IT management in a very new position so we have a much better understanding of what are the efforts we are putting into certain services, units and departments and you can completely change the way you make decisions and completely change the way you optimise your organisation and staffing levels."

He added: "Itil is the right choice for us. The intention is to roll Clio out globally."