ITSM Analyst, IT Service Desk, Federal Health Care Provider
The Wild West
The principal federal health care provider and health advocate for Native Americans, employs approximately 15,000 employees made up of a mixture of civil service, federal employees, and U.S. Public Health Services (USPHS) Commissioned Officers across 12 regions in the U.S. At each location, staff was using a different service management software — sometimes different tools were used in the same department for the same tasks — with no central process or procedures across the organization.
With no unified service desk process across the organization, various locations were using multiple programs and protocols, which caused confusion and impacted productivity. Our federal health care client needed to streamline its work if they hoped to grow. Cask was brought in to strengthen their program management and operations.
“One of the driving factors to use ServiceNow was to have a mature, ITIL-based tool so that our client could bring their geographically disperse regions, using multiple tool sets together onto a single platform and tool set,” project manager Robert Mathador said.
[In five months], we’ve had almost 24,000 incidents opened. So, it’s actually teaching us a lot about what we didn’t know with process. Everything going through the system has been the biggest positive change for us.
ITSM Analyst, IT Service Desk, Federal Health Care Provider
Getting to Work
Under a contracting agreement with ServiceNow and Cask, our federal health care client began implementing ServiceNow at the company’s facilities in Albuquerque and Phoenix first.
The “off-premises” cloud-based application, as a next generation enterprise ITSM platform provided the organization with:
- Incident Management
- Knowledge Management
- Change Management
- Outage Notifications
- Self-Service Portal
Cask has helped us unify 3 of our 12 areas, as well as our headquarters on a common tool and platform with regards to providing IT service management. They’ve really helped us champion change in an organization resistive to change; coming up with great ideas and ways forward to help us accomplish that.
Manager, IT Service Desk, Federal Health Care Provider
With Cask as a partner, our federal health care client was able to realize improvement of IT service delivery consistency, quality and responsiveness across the agency, improvement of visibility and collaboration across IT support tiers, improvement of IT reporting and analytics and the ability to quantify the value of support efforts provided. Additionally, they now have access to a central knowledge repository of IT information, and standardization of ITSM protocols.
“We’re now able to audit and show value for the work that we do. We have also helped communicate and provide visibility into issues our end users experience.” said the federal health care ITSM Analyst.
Adoption has been successful across the board, and other locations have begun to use ServiceNow platform tool. She added, “[In five months], we’ve had almost 24,000 incidents opened. So, it’s actually teaching us a lot about what we didn’t know with process. Everything going through the system has been the biggest positive change for us.”
At one location, 50 percent of the requests now come through the self service portal. “Being able to use one system, and not to have to bounce between the system and email, has been a huge success.”
Putting the New Solution to the Test
During the initial implementation, a government shutdown paused a lot of the work at the agency. Staffing levels were low, causing disparities in ServiceNow implementation levels.
Despite these difficulties, the buy-in from satellite locations in Albuquerque and Phoenix showed the rest of the federal health care provider’s leadership that an enterprise solution would not only work across the whole organization, but make them more resilient in the future.
Proven Results
The real difference with Cask is in the team’s passion for what they do. They provide ideas that help guide us toward improving ourselves. Robert and his team have really helped us make better decisions and guided us through the entire process. -Manager, IT Service Desk, Federal Health Care Provider
Through its partnership with Cask, our federal health care client has gained more efficiency across each of its processes.
“The agency is saving money and time by using an automated business process and
business tool with ServiceNow, rather than continuing to do everything manually. ServiceNow has allowed those processes to become automated, and workflow has been streamlined,” said Robert Mathador, a Project Manager at Cask.
Cask continues to work with stakeholders to configure the system to changing government requirements. In Phase 2 of the agreement with Cask, our federal health care client will be able to implement other ServiceNow benefits, including problem management, request management, configuration and licenses, and an Amazon like experience for users requesting hardware, software, and other tools.
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