The #servicenow Twitter hashtag continues to be a source of interesting people - customers, partners, prospects and employees of the company.
On Twitter (and "in real life" at Knowledge 12) I met Adriene Radcliffe who contributes some interesting thoughts and opinions on IT Service Management.
I was interested to know more about how ITSM is perceived at a major American education institution.
Please introduce yourself.
I'm Adriene Nazaretian Radcliffe, Director of Service Management for Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in the US.
I've worked for Yale for over 25 years in nearly all aspects of IT at one time or another, both on the Central Campus of Yale University and at the Yale School of Medicine. Because of my diverse background, it has allowed me to build a wealth of institutional knowledge and relationships within the organization, which are invaluable assets.
ITSM professionals are welcome to contact me at LinkedIn or you can follow me on Twitter at @a_radcliffe. I also blog about the ITSM implementation at Yale at itsm.yale.edu
[ Adriene stands behind the word "Service" wearing a white top ]
Yale University is a world famous brand and is associated with prestige and quality from an educational point of view.
How do those values translate into your work in IT Service Management and what is the history of ITSM in Yale University?
The declared mission of Yale to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge. Yale aims to carry out each part of its mission at the highest level of excellence, on par with the best institutions in the world.
Yale's Associate Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Len Peters, translated this into our IT mission statement
"To be recognized globally as the leading technology organization across universities, through rock-solid services, innovation, technology leadership and community satisfaction".
A few years back, IT had a fledgling ITSM effort which fell short of being fully successful. Yale did not have an overarching IT Service Management strategy or focus, but Yale did have small pockets of excellence within the IT silos. Our service management strategy is to capitalize and expand on those pockets but also commit to an ITSM discipline and strategy to really improve the quality of our services and ultimately provide world class services to our world class community.
We are committed to having a strong ITSM discipline and strategy towards giving our community of faculty, staff and students capacity which we will use to improve our services and ultimately allow us to really innovate. The focus for a university such as Yale is to deliver a world class IT organization and experience to our community.
There are a number of higher education organizations that are prominent in the ServiceNow community at the moment — Yale and Emory in the US, Bournemouth in the UK and I've seen news from the University of South Florida on Twitter recently.
What's happening in the educational world at the moment to drive Universities towards enterprise ITSM tools? Is there a trend or just a co-incidence that ITSM professionals in the .edu space are more prominent?
I don't think it's a coincidence at all. The interesting thing about a university environment is that we already have established forums such as the IVY Plus groups or Educause where we share information, participate in surveys and communicate broadly.
Because of this, we are more likely to share our strategy, or discuss how we are solving specific problems, and share opportunity learning. Nearly all universities are facing the same choices with budget challenges, increasing complexity of end-point computing, and how to digitize all aspects of our business. At the same time, the community we serve must be comfortable with the channels in which they can receive support which can vary greatly.
The ITSM industry seems to be pre-occupied with BYOD and Service Catalog so far in 2012. Both features driven by the end user experience
There is definitely a trend of people wanting to be treated as consumers of IT services rather than "captive" users.
Your consumers are tech-savvy, smart, young students. How has that affected your IT strategy? Do you have any insights into how they feel about interacting with the IT organization at Yale and how does it compare to their other consumer experiences?
We survey our entire community of faculty, staff and students annually about their IT experience and how they perceive our services in terms of performance against their expectations. We aim to align service improvement plans with your community's' expectations. This in turn affects your strategy.
A good example of this at Yale was in our network area. After we reviewed the yearly survey results, it became apparent that students were quite satisfied with throughput, but it was the coverage in common grounds area that they were most interested in expanding. Our networking group was able to rapidly respond that by installing an additional 500 access points in those areas to increased coverage.
When we see a service trending as a commodity or alternately a vendor in highly specialized area, and we believe the community experience will be better served with a partnership we refine our strategy to encompass that.
With respect to the preoccupation with Service Catalog, any time you can automate it's a good thing!
You recently adopted ServiceNow. Having completed your deployment what would you have done differently and what were the 3 biggest challenges with the project?
We began in September 2011 with ITIL Foundations Certification for a significant number of our staff (85% of the 425 IT staff) and completed process planning for several months. Our philosophy of getting everyone on board with the concepts and the language, followed by the process work and finally using the technology as an accelerator paid off. In just 8 months in April 2012, we went live with Incident, Problem, Change, Knowledge, and a vanilla Request through the Service Catalog. We also piloted the Discovery Process, which has not yet gone live and will likely be part of our CMDB project.
Challenge 1 - The time constraint. We completed some financial analysis and knew we could get a real return on investment provided we were live by the spring 2012 and had sunset our prior Service Management tool by May 31. This would save us both in licensing costs but also the upcoming hardware refresh to support the existing system.
Challenge 2 - Harmonizing the processes. Historically we had 3 Incident Processes with 10 local flavors. We iterated through those differences and finally came to 1. We utilized ITIL process specialists in some of the workshops, and that was helpful. Considering how we would categorize things in terms of business services was something we had not done before and working that side of the process configuration was more difficult and time consuming than we had anticipated.
Challenge 3 — Deployment volume. Our deployment waves became constrained simply by the volume of individuals we wanted to train and onboard. Our strategy was to first train coaches in each team and in each physical location. They helped us with their local deployments, and later became part of our local ITSM Practitioners Group to exchange tips and tricks. This was followed by training and deployment to teams who were using our old platform. This was followed by the first large wave of Tier II application support teams. At this point we had built enough momentum such that coaches starting training their staff, and teams began "sneaking on" before their deployment dates or training.
We currently have 2 teams remaining to onboard as part of our primary IT group because they have special "field service" requirements. We have also started to onboard other IT service providers, called IT Partners, who work in different departments and professional schools at Yale.
What is on your roadmap for 2012?
We are going to focus next year on a few large initiatives in Service Management, such as our Configuration Management Database (including Contract Management and Software Asset Management) and replacing a large legacy system of self-service requests with the Service Catalog and request management workflow.
We're also going to do some quick wins, for example, Bomgar integration with ServiceNow, which will allow remote access to client computers and saves time recording steps to remediation. We are integrating knowledge management with our website for public facing articles, hopefully we'll also proceed with the ServiceNow "Berlin" upgrade and possibly pilot the new Coaching Loops module as part of our quality assurance process at the Help Desk to check a sampling of tickets.
Thanks Adriene!
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