ServiceNow Project Achieves First Milestone

Back in September, University IT (UIT) announced its plans to significantly improve our clients' end-to-end experience with our services through a series of service management initiatives. (See article.) Last month, we delivered on a significant milestone in our plans by going live with an implementation of the ServiceNow service management system.

Bridging the gap

UIT delivers and supports a handful of technology services to Stanford Health Care (SHC), including voice, paging, and call center services. When SHC clients needed assistance with one of our services, they'd submit a request to their local support, who then might have to manually route the request to UIT. This could cause delays in answering questions or solving problems. Tracking of those requests was also problematic because SHC and UIT support staff used different tracking systems.

In February, we completed our Alpha Phase of our ServiceNow implementation initiative, integrating a campus ServiceNow system with the existing SHC ServiceNow system. The integration gives the university and hospital service desks the ability to track and transfer support tickets submitted for University IT services. This seamless exchange offers the service desks and clients a more simplified, consistent process and experience.

“This release is the culmination of several months of effort. All members of the project team — the UIT Service Management Steering Committee, UAT testers, Change Champions, our entire project team — worked diligently to make this happen,” said Kathy Pappas Kassaras, director of Service Management.

More to come

The Alpha Phase is a key milestone but only the beginning of a transformative, multiyear effort to enhance clients’ end-to-end experience with University IT services.

Phase I, which will allow UIT to use many of ServiceNow's features, will go live in October 2016; Phase 2, which will allow other campus organizations to use the tool, is currently scheduled for May 2017.

Some of the processes in the ServiceNow releases include:

• Incident management — Responding to a reported failure or degradation of service and restoring service as quickly as possible.
• Change management — Managing the change made to a production environment from inception to completion. 
• Knowledge management — Improving efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge.
• Problem management — Managing an unknown cause of one or more incidents.
• Non-billable requests — Supporting requests that are not considered an incident and are non-billable, e.g., training request, password reset, etc. 

To see a full timeline or to stay up to date on project communications, visit the Service Management Program website.