Itil

Using ITIL® at the IRS: A business journey

Case Study January 2011

© The APM Group and The Stationery Office 2011

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Using ITIL® at the IRS: A business journey

Contents

Introduction The beginnings Making the training work Going forward Acknowledgements Trademarks and statements

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© The APM Group and The Stationery Office 2011

Using ITIL® at the IRS: A business journey

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Introduction
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury in the USA. In the fiscal year 2009, the organization collected more than $2.3 trillion in revenue and processed more than 236 million tax returns. For every $100 it collected in the financial year 2009, it spent just 50 cents. In its five-year strategic plan, covering the period 2009 to 2013, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Douglas Shulman said, ‘To succeed we will need to excel at both service and enforcement to meet our mission: it isn’t an either/or proposition. To succeed, we will support [our] goals by investing in two strategic foundations – our people and our technology. We will strive to make the IRS the best place to work in government. We will give our people the technology they need to improve efficiency, ensure privacy and security of data and target the highest risk areas of abuse and tax fraud.’ In order to meet the goals outlined by Shulman, the IRS’s Modernization Information Technology Services (MITS) organization began the process of assessing its IT environment to better understand what changes could be made in the context of best practices that would improve the end-user experience delivered to business units and taxpayers on a daily basis. As you can imagine, with a staff of 8,000 providing technology and management support for 102,000 IRS workers operating across the United States, this was no easy task. After several months of research and analysis, ITIL® was chosen as the preferred service management framework for the IRS to operate