Härryda kommun automates IT service to deliver better support

A ‘Super’ Municipality

When the present municipality of Härryda was established in 1971, it comprised 17,400 inhabitants. Today, over 39,000 citizens reside in both Härryda’s largest town, Mölnlycke, and its scenic, less populated agricultural areas.

“It’s a great place to live,” says Anders Lagerkvist, IT Manager at Härryda kommun. “It has character and it’s close to nature. But it also has an international airport and is close to Gothenburg, which is the second largest city in Sweden.” In fact, the region is so attractive and the municipality so dedicated to its role that the population has been steadily increasing.

Härryda’s efforts to modernize and widen its service offering has been one of the reasons for several Super Municipality of the Year nominations, taking the top spot in 2022.

Streamlining IT processes for improved operations

To maintain its popularity, continue improving services to citizens, and strive for technology excellence, Härryda kommun sought to transform its IT department to make it more proactive instead of reactive.

“We want to become even better at realizing the needs that exist within schools, care for the elderly, community-building, and the municipality’s other services,” says Anders. “But our previous systems weren’t as effective as we would have liked, and the processes were disjointed. Change was necessary for us to be able to work more efficiently and create more benefits for our citizens.”

The municipality’s IT function could no longer afford the time taken to move cases between the old IT support system, SharePoint, and Teams. It needed to replace its IT support with one better adapted to its needs and sought a platform solution capable of automating and optimizing technology service operations as well as streamlining its daily and long-term workflows to ensure simpler processes. This would allow more time for infrastructure and services development in order to add more value to the municipality’s operations.

Expanding technology solutions while reducing costs

After looking at several solutions, ServiceNow stood out to the team at Härryda kommun as the best choice. With ServiceNow partner, ATEA, the municipality implemented ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM), allowing it to consolidate IT support from across various systems into a single platform. It was important to use the out-of-the-box functionality to reduce costs and make it easy for the municipality to manage and upgrade the platform without any external support in the future.

End to end, the implementation took six months. “It was a fairly simple process,” says Anders. “ATEA educated us on ServiceNow, and we did some training for the staff members”.

“We had two integrations included in the project for Active Directory and the SCCM (Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager) platform, which also went smoothly.”

But the two integrations were just the beginning. The municipality is now working on integrating Microsoft Intune, a cloud-based endpoint management solution, and hopes to integrate other systems too with the aim of getting everything within ServiceNow. This will ensure one interface and one dashboard, providing greater visibility of services and making them easier to manage.

“The integrations that we are now working on are something we do pretty much ourselves within Integration Hub,” says Anders. “Our strategic goal is to be self-sufficient. We will always need some support, but getting these new integrations to work by ourselves is also a great way to learn more about the platform.”

ServiceNow has been ticking all the boxes as the municipality’s IT-function’s new service platform, delivering a better, more efficient service. “It is easy to work in. While being very adaptable, at the same time we can utilize its out-of-the-box functionality,” says Anders.

Consolidating support services, removing complexity

The new solution connects all IT activities, from when an incident is raised and received, up until the necessary changes are made and the incident is resolved, all without the municipality’s IT team having to move activities between different IT support systems. And the traceability becomes much more apparent while the quality of response is increased and mean time to resolutions are reduced.

“Previously, for example, every time someone needed to back up a database before an upgrade, they would send an email or a chat message to the technician,” recalls Anders.

“Now, in our service portal, a request can be made for a server backup or an investigation before an upgrade. The technician receives this as a ticket in ServiceNow and by using the system, can plan the activity ahead. In the process, we get the traceability. This is something that used to take several steps across separate communication channels.”

Greater visibility. Greater control.

A streamlined, single-platform approach to IT service across the municipality is now resulting in the team receiving reminders when documents need to be revised or notifications when case resolution times are running close to SLAs.

“The old system lacked functionality, so it’s difficult to get a before-vs.-after measurement. We have the same number of incidents coming to us, as predicted, but if I talk to my service desk, they are very happy with the dashboard. They now have a good view of all the incidents, and they can follow the SLAs. We are much more efficient.”

Automated processes and workflows have simplified operations, enabling the IT team to focus on more complex tasks while delivering seamless employee experiences, resiliency, and productivity. The portal also makes it easier for the IT team to update users on the status of their cases.

Increased self-service via the new portal powered by ServiceNow ITSM will see an increase in users being able to register new support cases and solving many common problems without the need to raise a ticket.

A key consideration for Härryda kommun when selecting a new IT support system was the availability and visibility of data and the timely creation of reports. Previously, it took hours to generate an advanced report; with the ServiceNow platform, data can be extrapolated, in some cases, in less than a minute.

“We can now quickly pick up cases that are linked to specific errors and produce reports to see if we meet our goals,” says Anders. “As a manager, I can easily capture how we use our time, so that we can then prioritize appropriately.”

Proactive approach makes for smoother operations

ServiceNow helped the municipality drive technology best practices with optimized, efficient processes. Automation, improved visibility of real-time data, and more readily available reporting has made it possible for the IT team to work more proactively, thus bringing greater business benefits.

Anders and his team can now provide a much better service to employees across the municipality due to improved access to information and incident management, ultimately unlocking unseen value to citizens: “Our primary goal is to support the business around us so they can add more value to the municipality,” says Anders. “We now have a better, greater IT service, and with more automation and more integration, we can be even more effective.”

“The thing that I’m most proud of is that we now have more business trust, and we will continue to work smarter for our citizens by automating, integrating, and learning from the ServiceNow solution.”