ITSM leads the way in the public sector

The financial crisis in the public sector has highlighted how best practice and innovative use of ITSM tools are helping managers to find creative ways to reduce cost. Patrick Bolger, chief marketing officer at Hornbill Systems explains how Government policy is driving investment in technology.

In the last decade, strategic initiatives like e-Government set a progressive agenda for technology in Government, with the mission, as described by Tony Blair, of “ensuring that IT supports the business transformation of government itself so that we can provide better, more efficient, public services.”

Although several eGovernment programmes have received criticism for slow and patchy progress, there can be no doubt that in many ways, technology has made interaction with government a less torturous task. Renewing car tax online is now relatively painless, compared with digging out paperwork and making the trip to the local Post Office to fill out forms and pay by cheque.

One of the six principles of eGovernment was a commitment to “promote global best practice”, which fuelled the adoption of frameworks such as ITIL and the ISO/IEC 20000 standard. While central Government was relatively well versed in ITSM frameworks, it took a little longer for other areas of the public sector to embrace best practice. Today, an ever-increasing number of services are being made available online and with IT being placed directly in the public view, ITIL is now widely adopted by all areas of the public sector to manage service delivery and improvement.

Following Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report in Dec 2009, economists stated that “Whitehall departments’ budgets will be reduced by almost a fifth after the next election – a reduction of almost £36 billion over three years.” The current Public Sector budget deficit of £16.2bn and a net debt figure equivalent to 60 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) are stark figures that require drastic action by whichever political party holds the reins after this year’s general election.

Although the Government does not produce regular figures for its total IT spending, analysts at Cable estimated the figure at around £17 billion for 2007/08. In its study “Operational Efficiency Program,” HM Treasury said “Back-office operations and IT, led by Martin Read, recommends better management information, benchmarking and review of costs, and better governance of IT-enabled change programmes to achieve £4 billion of savings a year on back office operations, and £3.2 billion of savings a year on IT spending.”

It will no doubt be challenging to find such huge savings, particularly when the demand for services in the public sector is increasing and service levels are expected to be maintained and improved. Against a backdrop of anticipated budget cuts and headcount freeze, organisations are looking at innovative ways to maintain service levels and IT service management tools have a critical role to play in delivering efficiencies.

Annual surveys by the Society of Information Technology Management (socitm) show that since 2005, Hornbill has consistently been the fastest growing IT service management software vendor to local authorities, with more than twice as many customers acquired in the sector than our closest competitors. In compiling this article I sought feedback from our customers in separate areas of the public sector and asked whether their investment in ITSM would enable them to cope with reduced budgets.

Central and local Government anticipate a fairly significant reduction in IT spending, but many believe that they will not feel the impact during 2010, as budgets have already been agreed. These organisations believe that continued investment in best practice this year will enable them to cope with the inevitable reality of having to achieve more with less during the next four to five years.

Plymouth City Council has gone live with seven ITIL disciplines and is introducing improvements to existing and new processes using elements of both ITIL v2 and v3 with Hornbill’s Supportworks ITSM. Disciplines already deployed include Incident, Change, Configuration, Problem, Request Fulfilment, Access Management and Service Level Management. The ICT Service Delivery Team is currently working on Release, Event and Knowledge Management.

“Plymouth City Council is committed to using the ITIL framework. It helps us improve service efficiency, improve system availability, allow prioritisation of services, and ensure better quality assurance,” explains Mel Gwynn, operational service delivery manager at Plymouth City Council. “This enables the Council to save money while better serving citizens. Supportworks ITSM has enabled us to implement ITIL in a phased manner. We have now largely completed implementing many of our processes and are looking at where we can adopt elements of ITIL v3 to provide further improvements. This approach allows us to mature our existing ITIL v2 processes and adopt new ITIL v3 processes at our own pace.”

The ICT Team has also implemented the Supportworks Customer SelfService portal where the most frequent service requests are standardised. Callers to the Service Desk are encouraged to use the SelfService facility wherever possible, which reduces the load on the Service Desk and eliminates time wasted requesting further information. “Service delivery performance has definitely improved when compared to our old way of working,” says Gwynn. “This is down to the combination of Supportworks ITSM and the fact that we have revisited our processes, streamlined and automated them using the ITIL framework.”

Customer Service Direct (CSD) is a public-private partnership between BT, Suffolk County Council and Mid Suffolk District Council. The organisation is a joint venture formed to provide a collaborative infrastructure that can support the councils and the services that they provide to the public. CSD has pioneered such a new working partnership to create a shared services model; an approach that has been promoted within several Government reports, to drive efficiencies by uniting resources and expertise.

The organisation provides central HR and ICT support functions based on ITIL best practice to the members of the partnership, in a more cost efficient way. At the heart of the support services is a centralised IT and HR support desk that uses Hornbill’s Supportworks ESP (Enterprise Support Platform). Implementing Supportworks as a central system enables the partners to deliver service at a consistently high performance, while also managing costs.

Initially proven with use by the centralised ICT team to support council employees, Supportworks has also been rolled out for use by the HR team and is now accessible to 500 staff. Using Supportworks as a consolidated service platform enables staff to support over 6,000 PCs used by employees throughout the partner organisations, as well as HR support to over 30,000 local authority staff and a further 40,000 ex-council staff. The system is able to identify different types of customer, so that each receives the appropriate support level.

NHS Connecting for Health (CfH) came into operation in April 2005 with a primary role of delivering the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). NPfIT commits the NHS to lifelong electronic health records for patients, round the clock, with online access to patient records for clinicians and information about best clinical practice. Although there has been some controversy regarding the delay in introducing some of the services, many services have been successfully deployed.

NHS Trusts can choose to support these new services and systems using their own resources, or by contracting with their Local Service Provider (LSP). Although Trusts can reduce costs by providing the service themselves, they must be accredited by CfH to ensure that they are supporting those services and communicating with other service providers using a common language and in a consistent manner. This has driven adoption of the ITIL framework and in financial terms, the NHS would benefit greatly if every trust were to become accredited.

There is no doubt that the National Programme for IT will bring huge benefits to patients through increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of staff and clinicians. However, it brings with it challenges for the IT department, as they are faced with integrating new systems and supporting increasing numbers of users through their organisation. Investment in IT service management technology enables IT teams to provide a more responsive and efficient service to large numbers of end users, without increasing headcount.

Hornbill has gained significant traction within the healthcare sector by providing an ITIL-compatible solution that can be deployed in just days with full support for the CfH minimum data set. This enables NHS and Primary Care Trusts to seamlessly integrate with the LSP and automates reporting of contractual service level agreements (SLAs). NHS Trusts that have already been accredited by CfH using Supportworks CfH solution includes; Buckinghamshire Hospitals, Chelsea & Westminster, and Wirral Health Informatics.

Anglia Support Partnership has adopted a shared services approach, providing IT services to five NHS organisations in the East of England and is using Supportworks ITSM to manage and improve service delivery to over 10,000 employees at 200 locations. The Partnership provides IT support services to staff in its seven partner organisations – NHS Cambridgeshire, Cambridgeshire Community Services, NHS Norfolk, Norfolk Community Health & Care, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, NHS Peterborough, Peterborough Community Services, as well as the Strategic Health Authority – NHS East of England.

University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust, a major acute teaching hospital, has successfully utilised Supportworks ITSM to manage the new Registration Authority Smart Card system, part of the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). The trust has over 4,000 security verified users that will be registered with the Authority. The IT team is now using Supportworks ITSM to record the details of every NHS CRS Smart Card issued, including user identifier, access rights and a history of any changes and the expiry date.

“Under NPfIT we are increasingly bringing in new systems to support both administration and specialist departments and our users need support,” says Mark Wright, head of service management at the Trust. “We now have the framework to provide a managed service to end users, as well as the ability to adopt ITIL best practice, a key part of our IT strategy. We can now provide the evidence necessary to become a Connecting for Health Accredited Service Desk. This enables us to provide a seamless service, linking up to our Local Service Provider to streamline support resolution.”

Historically ITIL has had less traction in the education sector, with many institutions believing that the framework was complex and expensive to adopt. However, much has changed in the last few years. Education now faces many of the same challenges as other areas of the public sector; increased investment in technology, coupled with heavier dependency on IT for learning, teaching and administration has driven the need to transform service support from fire-fighting to proactive IT service management.

The Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) is a powerful lobbying voice that represents the whole of higher education, and increasingly further education, in the provision and development of academic, management and administrative information systems. UCISA has published resources and is producing case studies and materials in bite-sized chunks that are easier to digest. The work is intended to assist both institutions new to ITIL and those that have already embarked upon ITIL implementations, helping institutions to look at the ITIL framework to review and improve their service management processes.

IT staff within universities face common challenges from the sheer size of the user populations they support. IT is stretched to deliver service to thousands of academic and administrative staff and students numbering in the tens of thousands. The budget cuts announced by Lord Mandelson in Dec 2009 further increases the pressure on IT to deliver even greater levels of operational efficiency. Hornbill has a significant presence in the education sector and many of our customers are finding innovative ways of getting the most from their investment in service management technology, by extending its use to other departments and faculties.

At the University of Northumbria the reliance on IT has grown exponentially over the last ten years, and increasingly IT systems provide a backbone to the University’s daily business. The 130-strong IT Services department uses Supportworks service desk software to underpin and strengthen the provision of service to staff and students. Originally used for IT service management, Supportworks has now been extended to other areas; Estates Management, Security, Finance, Library & Learning Services and the Academic School Administration offices use the tool to manage and automate an array of different service requests.

By offering a number of interactive services Northumbria has encouraged use of the Customer SelfService portal across the institution. Users can request new passwords by text, with responses sent directly to a mobile phone. Text messages can be sent to advise that day’s menu in the restaurants, or even the availability of computers in the open access areas for students.

Northumbria IT Services operates an out-of-hours service on behalf of NorMAN (North Eastern Metropolitan Area Network), providing first line support to other universities. This service is not viable for individual institutions, given the relatively small number of students requiring help outside core business hours and at weekends. The Out of Hours Helpline now covers 17 universities located in Scotland, Yorkshire, the Midlands, London, the South Coast and South West.

This innovative use of Supportworks has enhanced IT Services’ ability to provide an improved service to increasing numbers of users, without needing to hire additional staff, while income from subscribers to the out of hours service is generating revenue that helps to cover overheads. According to Debbie Figgis, IT customer services manager at Northumbria University; “There is no doubt that we can now provide a better service to our customers, while retaining the same level of IT resource. It has made us more efficient as a team, with reduced duplication of logging and tracking calls. The SelfService option has made our service more transparent, which has also improved our customer service.”

The Gershon Efficiency Review, commissioned in 2003 by central government assessed how the public sector could exploit opportunities for efficiency savings, so that resources could be released for front-line public service delivery. The programme aims to raise productivity, enhance value for money and deliver efficiency gains through reforms that involved ‘Doing the same for less, or more for the same’.

Despite the bleak projections for IT spending, Hornbill anticipates continued demand for technology that enables public sector organisations to operate more efficiently. Against a backdrop of headcount and budget cuts it will be almost impossible for the public sector to sustain momentum without technology that enables these organisations to cope with demand and maintain service levels. The examples above demonstrate that innovative use of service management tools creates efficiencies that enable budget stricken service departments to manage through an economic downturn.

More examples of Hornbill customers in the public sector can be found at: www.hornbill.com/company/success