2014 Larry L. Sautter Award for Innovation in Information Technology

Building a Service-oriented Culture at UC DavisSubmitter’s Name

Anita Nichols, Client Services Manager, Information and Educational Technology (IET)

ajnichols@ucdavis.edu / (530) 752 4386

Project Name

IT Service Management Program

Sponsor

Morna Mellor, Senior Director, IET

Contributing Organizations

College of Engineering (CoE)

Information and Educational Technology (IET)

Office of Chancellor and Provost (OCP)

School of Education (SoE)

School of Law

Technologies Utilized

ServiceNow

Bomgar

Drupal

Logi Analytics

Project Timeframe

February 2013 – current

Relevant URLs

http://itsm.ucdavis.edu

http://itsm.ucdavis.edu/about

http://itcatalog.ucdavis.edu

http://itexpress.ucdavis.edu

http://atswp.ucdavis.edu/studenttech

http://kb.ucdavis.edu

http://ucdavisit.service-now.com/ess (launches 5/29/2014)

Key Contributors

Ahna Ligtenberg Heller (Communication Analyst, IET)

Anita Nichols (Client Services Manager, IET)

Aric Horstman (ServiceNow Admin, UC Berkeley)

Arnaud Menut (Programmer, IET)

Bill Buchanan (Senior Writer, IET)

Carson Black (Web Development, IET)

Caryn DeMoura (Student Support Supervisor, IET)

Dan Wright (IT Express Supervisor, IET)

Florencio Inzunza III (Director of Technology, OCP)

Jamie Butler (Executive Director of IT, CoE)

Jason Fearing (Knowledge Management Analyst, IET)

Jesse Avina (IT Express Analyst, IET)

Joshua Smith (Desktop Support Analyst, IET)

Student Support Group

Joshua Van Horn (Enterprise Services Manager, IET)

Justin Anonuevo (Reporting Analyst, UC Berkeley)

Kam Chand (IT Express Analyst, IET)

Ken Jones (IT Service Manager, CoE)

Kevin Loenker (IT Express Analyst, IET)

Mark Deamer (Graphic Designer, IET)

Mark Miller (Web Development, IET)

Michael Loranc (IT Express Analyst, IET)

Mike Waid (IT Express Team Lead, IET)

Minor Rojas (IT Business Process Analyst, IET)

Nancy Wallace (IT Express Analyst, IET)

Quico Gonzalez (Data Center Manager, IET)

Shawn DeArmond (Web Development, IET)

Steve Pigg (IT Director, SoE)

Steven Schwarz (Director of IT, CIO, School of Law)

Sukhjinder Gill (ServiceNow Administrator, IET)

The IT Service Management team developed and implemented a comprehensive IT Service Management program in less than a year, concurrent to launching the service automation platform, ServiceNow. The core project team’s long term vision, to become a premier IT service management provider, drove its short term goals and continues to drive its achievements. Within a year, the team took the disparate pieces of an unorganized service management offering and put them together in a way that is cohesive, recognizable, customer-focused, and has ultimately started them on the path to improve the way that IT services are delivered at UC Davis.

The team’s innovation in information technology is their approach to IT service management. They determined early on that customer experience must be considered every step of the way, and consequently, they developed an approach to guide them that focuses “outside-in” rather than the traditional “inside-out.”

How the journey began

Customer feedback identified a gap between the perceptions of IT staff who provided IT services and campus customers who received them. IT services were requested and captured using multiple ticket management tools and over 70 email addresses. This contributed to the customers’ perception of IT services as difficult to obtain, complicated and confusing.

In August 2012, Morna Mellor, the Senior Director of Enterprise, Application, Infrastructure Services at UC Davis, launched an initiative to identify and evaluate opportunities to improve service management capabilities for the campus. Included in the improvement plan were the following:

1. Establishment of a governance model with focus on the needs of IT service management on campus

2. Development of a knowledge management capability to provide opportunities to make service support more efficient and consistent to the campus community

3. Adopting a flexible tool (ServiceNow) to provide a balance between autonomy and independence of individual campus colleges with the economy of scale afforded by the consolidation of processes and tools

4. Development of a service catalog to provide a location for customers to find information regarding available IT services and for service managers to market the features and benefits of such services

5. Implement an online reporting tool to enable service-level management

Project initiation

The project was framed with customer-centric goals that had the usual constraints of limited resources and urgent timing. The uniqueness of our approach was that most of our achievements were not through a “top down” edict, but rather represented the collaborative, community-based approach of departments and units at UC Davis united through the desire to deliver more effective IT services. This was accomplished through centralizing in a decentralized environment and embracing the concept of sharing information and a “virtual” service desk.

What we accomplishedServiceNow Pilot – February 2013

Key Contributors: Jamie Butler, Quico Gonzalez, Ken Jones, Anita Nichols, Steve Pigg

Absent a multi-million dollar budget, and highly constrained by a short implementation timeframe, the initial project team determined that a pilot launch of ServiceNow would be beneficial. The College of Engineering served as the ServiceNow test pilot, which was launched in February 2013. Lessons learned from the pilot included that success would be best achieved by using agile methodology to move through the development process instead of a “big bang” deployment. An Agile Scrum team was trained and the planning, developing, releasing, learning, and improving quickly followed. The early successes outweighed the initial risks and word caught on that ServiceNow was working.

Established Governance – February 2013

Key Contributors: Quico Gonzalez, Florencio Inzunza III, Ken Jones, Anita Nichols, Steve Pigg, Minor Rojas, Steven Schwarz, Joshua Van Horn

The project team developed a governance model that sought to guide how service capabilities were planned, designed, developed, and deployed to the community of IT service providers. It was decided that the primary service providers would form the governance committee. These stakeholders became the ITSM Technical Committee. The core team iterated through the purpose, authority, and decision making questions that all new committees struggle with but found that the charter to focus on the customer first helped them in the decision-making process.

Developed the ITSM team identity and branding – July 2013

Key Contributors: Justin Anonuevo, Bill Buchanan, Mark Deamer, Caryn DeMoura, Jason Fearing, Ahna Ligtenberg Heller, Anita Nichols, Minor Rojas, Dan Wright

The ITSM team developed a mission and values to help guide development of the service management program. They also developed a cohesive “look and feel” to identify all of their tools and services.

ServiceNow Launch – August 2013

Key Contributors: Jason Fearing, Quico Gonzalez, Aric Horstman, IT Express, Ken Jones, Ahna Ligtenberg Heller, Anita Nichols, Minor Rojas,

Information and Educational Technology and School of Education joined College of Engineering in ServiceNow on August 29, 2013. Overnight, a virtual support service desk appeared and customers only needed to know one email address, (compared to the previous 70 email addresses) to get help.

Prior to the launch, ServiceNow training, which was developed in-house, was provided to all 125 support analysts who were on-boarded in August. The 3-hour training included foundational knowledge of the tool, usability assistance, tips and tricks, an interactive team-based Jeopardy-style game and a hands-on practical lab. This customized in-person training program was delivered to multiple teams and received outstanding survey responses. Since the August launch, another 100 people have received training. The ITSM team has also prepared web-based video content for reinforcement.

Steve Pigg, IT Director of the School of Education said, “Once IT groups realize the benefits inherent to ServiceNow –transparency, community and improved communication – the use of the tool will become a campus-wide phenomena, because, ultimately, we are all serving the same customer – UC Davis.” 

Launched ITSM website –itsm.ucdavis.edu– August 2013

Key Contributors: Justin Anonuevo, Carson Black, Jason Fearing, Ahna Ligtenberg Heller, Anita Nichols, Minor Rojas

The ITSM website includes a snapshot of ITSM theory and research and introduces visitors to the project team and the technical committee. The website includes a blog, “Roundabout,” with columns by members of the ITSM team. An e-newsletter – ITSM Cycle - is sent monthly to the ServiceNow community detailing release notes and other helpful news, information and links to the ITSM site.

Launched Service Level Reporting – September 2013

Key Contributors: Justin Anonuevo, Arnaud Menut, Anita Nichols

Logi Analytics, a web-based business intelligence product, was implemented to address complex service reporting requirements needed to aggregate, manage and monitor metrics from multiples sources, such as the Automated Call Distribution system, ServiceNow, network monitoring systems, etc. Phase 2 will include publishing the service level metrics online, allowing interested stakeholders to evaluate IET service delivery. 

Launched the IT Service Catalog – itcatalog.ucdavis.edu – October 2013

Key Contributors: Armando Arbizo, Carson Black, Mark Deamer, Mark Miller, Shawn DeArmond, Ahna Ligtenberg Heller, Anita Nichols

The UC Davis IT Service Catalog, built in Drupal (an open source content management system), currently houses 150+ services, both business and technical. A considerable amount of time was spent designing the service detail page, to ensure that fields can accurately and effectively showcase each service. The Service Catalog will soon include a feature called “Emerging Services” which will give service owners and project managers the ability to market services before they are in production.

Revitalized IT Express, UC Davis’ central service desk, and added new capabilities – October 2013

Key Contributors: Jesse Avina, Bill Buchanan, Kam Chand, Ahna Ligtenberg Heller, Kevin Loenker, Michael Loranc, Anita Nichols, Mike Waid, Nancy Wallace, Dan Wright

The revitalization of IT Express began in 2013 with training the staff on excellence in technical support, culminating in achieving HDI team certification in October 2013. The revitalization effort continued into 2014 and included IT Express changing hours to better align with campus need, adding Bomgar chat and remote desktop control functionality, redesigning the website and adding a Facebook page to improve campus communications. These changes help meet the goal of providing a multi-channel support model to improve the customer experience.

Emeritus professors, who are frequent callers to IT Express, appreciate the higher level of service that Bomgar remote control offers. In addition, analysts note calls lengths have significantly reduced due to remote support.

After an iterative and formalized approach to transitioning support, IT Express is now the single point of contact for IET and Office of the Chancellor and Provost (OCP). Through formalizing support transitions, they have reduced the total cost of support while simultaneously creating documented, standardized service offerings. 

Launched the Student Support Program – November 2013

Key Contributors: Jesse Avina, Caryn DeMoura, Jason Fearing, Ahna Ligtenberg Heller, Anita Nichols, Mike Waid

Last fall, the ITSM team launched the Student Support Program by initially hiring eight students; four more students were hired this spring. The students are now working on first tier support at IT Express, the central service desk, and as knowledge and web analysts. In support of the customer-centric approach to all elements of the service management program, students conduct focus groups to engage the UC Davis campus community on topics such as effective web content, improving customer service and user experience.

In addition, the Program supports UC Davis students by providing practical job and project experience, from web development, user experience design, technical support and technical writing.

Launched the Knowledge Base – knowledgebase.ucdavis.edu – February 2014

Key Contributors: Jason Fearing, Anita Nichols, Aric Horstman, Justin Anonuevo, Kevin Loenker, Joshua Smith

The campus’ legacy knowledge base, xBase, has been replaced with a new Knowledge Base that is integrated into ServiceNow. Existing knowledge has been transitioned to the new knowledge base and content has been refreshed. The “look and feel” of the new Knowledge Base and the Service Catalog are similar and the same categories are used to search for both knowledge and services. There are logical cross linkages on both sites so customers experience a unified front when visiting both sites.

Knowledge Management training was created to foster a culture of knowledge transfer among analysts by providing an easy to follow method for communicating support steps to customers, consequently driving “Tier 0” inquiries toward our knowledge base and enabling support staff to tackle more complex customer support needs.

Launching the Employee Self-Service (ESS) portal – May 2014

Key Contributors: Mark Deamer, Sukhjinder Gill, Mark Miller, Anita Nichols, Minor Rojas

The ESS portal introduces the campus to the concept of self-service which can expedite response to customer needs and reduce overhead at the service desk. Customers can bookmark a portal where they access IT services, search the IT Knowledge Base, and submit requests for help. The portal’s consistency with the “look and feel” of other IT Service Management websites creates a recognizable service experience for customers.

How we achieved our mission

A nimble, lean project team and strong support from participating stakeholders helped move the project along at a quick pace. The grass roots, collaborative approach coupled with utilization of the agile methodology helped the team achieve more than they thought possible within a short amount of time.

A focus on user experience guided efforts and decision-making, ensuring that all levels and types of customer interactions were considered. Additionally, providing customers with an effective mechanism and process for providing feedback and suggestions for improvement – and quickly integrating the feedback into the development process – improved the customer experience and ultimately helped the team gain new customers on campus.

The results

To date, the initiative has resulted in the introduction of brand new, best-of-breed self-service tools, standardized information and user-friendly resources. These include: a comprehensive, searchable knowledge base filled with information on a variety of IET and campus services; a service catalog with 150+ entries; and multiple ways for customers to provide feedback on their needs and experience. For the first time, users can submit requests or incidents and then track their status through to completion – all online. On the back end, the IT support teams, both in IET and in other departments, now have access to a service management platform that enables them to manage and track IT incidents, problems and requests with much greater efficiency. A customer’s experience can now be understood and supported more efficiently, wherever it might originate. Also available for the first time are reporting tools with analytics capabilities that will give us a holistic view of support trends across the enterprise.

After just a year since it was launched, this multi-phase initiative is still in its infancy, and yet it has already yielded many important benefits. At UC Davis, it has resulted in greater operational efficiency and it has enhanced customer service. It has also brought together the IT service community in the pursuit of common goals. This is a strategy that other campuses could adapt and implement to suit their own environments so they too can deliver services better, faster, with greater consistency, and at lower cost.

What’s next?

This isn’t the end of the journey. The foundation is in place and the team is ready for the next stage which includes implementing change management, asset management, and continuing the development of the IT service catalog and ESS portal.

IT service management is not just about the process and the tools; it is about engaging and delighting customers. At UC Davis, the team took a comprehensive approach to developing and implementing their ITSM program. Packaging the program in a cohesive and recognizable way helps customers engage with the tools and services. The team started the project with the awareness that an important part of the customer experience is the “look and feel” of the sites customers visit and the messages they receive. By listening to their customers and designing tools and services with their perspective in mind, the team will continue to achieve their goal of creating a customer experience from the “outside-in.” As Ken Jones (IT Service Manager, College of Engineering) said, “IET is demonstrating that they are changing their method of service delivery from ‘look what we built, want to use it?’ to ‘let’s work together to find the best solutions for our customers’.”

May 16, 2014

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