Anglicare transforms its IT service management

Anglicare has re-platformed its IT service management and added new monitoring and observability capabilities, transforming both the way it manages its systems and how staff experience them.

(L-R) Colby Rook (ServiceNow), Sam Polur (Anglicare)

General manager of technology services Sam Polur told the ServiceNow World Forum Sydney that the IT service management (ITSM) and operations management (ITOM) transformation was run under a project called ‘service ignite’.

The transition to ServiceNow was driven by the need to support its 6000-plus staff and continued growth through mergers and acquisitions.

Polur described Anglicare’s previous ticketing system as a “slow, burning platform”.

“[It] wasn’t fit-for-purpose in the sense that it couldn’t be accessed from anywhere, anytime, on any device,” he said.

“Really, what we were looking for is a modern cloud-based solution.”

Polur said that caseworkers that encountered issues previously faced a difficult choice: “Do I spend time going through all of these hurdles to try to log onto a system to log a fault, or do I care for the client that I’m there for?”

In deciding to replace its ITSM and ITOM systems, the not-for-profit care provider determined that it didn’t just want to move from one ticketing system to another.

Rather, it wanted an “enablement” platform that made it simpler to interact with IT in the first instance, and potentially other functions as well down the track.

“What that meant for us is: is the platform able to bring other business units, other functions onto the journey as well, whether that's HR, finance, or GRC [governance, risk and compliance]?” Polur said.

Anglicare initially scoped a ServiceNow implementation that covered multiple business units, although it ultimately decided to step back and concentrate on IT in the first instance.

“When we first started, we were actually looking at not just the ITSM and ITOM perspective. We were actually looking at HR service delivery and finance,” he said.

“But the tough decisions that we had to make were, do we spend more time trying to bring everyone else onto that journey, or do we get quick wins and go through with an MVP [minimum viable product] by introducing ITSM and ITOM?

“It was a balance of our ambition and vision but also what's practical from a readiness perspective. So we had to make some tough decisions. What it meant was a laser focus on ITSM and ITOM.”

Anglicare worked with both Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and ServiceNow specialist Tinyloop to deliver the transformed ITSM and ITOM platform, which went live in February.

Since it’s been in place, Polur said that employee onboarding and offboarding to systems, and their ability to interact with IT and self-serve, is one of the key front-facing benefits.

Staff can interact through a mobile app, a virtual agent or via a Teams integration.

“We've made it very easy for caseworkers, for example, to actually interact with the system,” Polur said.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, there is more data available that is helping IT to “justify technology spend or just the services that we provide,” Polur said.

“Now that we've got the system and the reporting in place, we can actually look at the cost to serve in terms of all the various business units,” he said.

Another key outcome is that incident resolution processes and times have improved.

As part of its preparations for implementing ServiceNow, Anglicare made a concerted effort to understand its business processes and identify the internal owners of IT services and applications.

“When it came to service mapping, we needed to get clear on the end-to-end process with all of the different handoffs, and on who's actually responsible all the way through,” Polur said.

“What that meant when we built the system is … [now] when there's an application-related issue or an infrastructure-related issue, it isn't going between teams. It’s actually going to the right teams from the get-go.”

The result is that two out of three incidents are now resolved on their first assignment.

“When it comes in, it goes to the right team, which is why … it's actually getting resolved on the first go,” he said.

“Of course, if you need to hand off to different teams because it needs to be escalated, let's do that. But it's not going back and forth and causing a really bad employee experience.”

Anglicare has also been able to identify 40 percent of incidents through proactive alerts, as opposed to reactive tickets lodged by impacted staff.

“From an Anglicare perspective, we've actually brought on SolarWinds and New Relic from the perspective of monitoring and observability, so what we're doing now is ingesting all of that information into ServiceNow,” Polur said.

“We actually get a lot more alerts as opposed to incidents, but the way that the ‘smarts’ and the system is built [means that if] they're resolved by themselves, we don't even get notified.

“There's a lot of work that's actually gone into giving us that proactiveness. Whereas in the past, we used to get a call from one of our sites saying, 'Hey, we're down. We can't function. We can't operate', we're now in this proactive scenario because of alerting and the way that the system's configured, that we actually know a lot sooner than the business does [if something is wrong].”

Ry Crozier attended ServiceNow World Forum in Sydney as a guest of ServiceNow.