Ensuring lifelong equality of opportunity

Community Living Toronto (CLToronto) has a simple vision: a society where everyone belongs, a society where everyone is valued.

The organization has spent over 75 years championing the rights and choices of people of all ages living with an intellectual disability. Today, it is at the heart of a growing network of nonprofit organizations working together to foster equitable and inclusive communities across Canada.

In Toronto alone, CLToronto’s 1,200 strong team delivers support and services, community programs, and supported living for more than 4,000 people and their families, providing independence, equality of opportunity, and a true sense of belonging.

Anchoring its digital transformation in ServiceNow

While not all CLToronto’s team are focused on direct service delivery within supported living or peoples’ local communities, it is clear that a sense of shared purpose and pride runs through the entire organization.

Many of CLToronto's executive team have extensive experience within the sector, building strong connections with the people supported, their families, and support networks. These insights inform their leadership roles. Chief Digital Services Officer Casey Pruden, a 30-year veteran at CLToronto, says, "We are all personally motivated and invested to get things done as seeing the positive impacts of our work, either direct or indirect, on both individuals and local communities, is incredibly rewarding."

CLToronto’s Director of Digital Services is Aymen Ben Hassouna, who joined the organization in 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. “It’s so inspiring to see what a key role technology can play in empowering our people to do such important and meaningful work, which improves the quality of life for so many people.”

CLToronto has continued to be a leader and active collaborator in the sector, rapidly extending its range and reach, sharing best practices, and supporting smaller, like-minded organizations with digital infrastructure and services.

Foundational to this success was CLToronto’s decision to adopt ServiceNow, the AI platform for Business Transformation. Deploying a single platform, data model, and architecture would be the anchor for delivering consistency and scalability for its digital transformation program.

“We had a simple goal, to make it as easy as possible for our teams to have access to the support they need, quickly and efficiently, regardless of where they are working, so they can maximize the time spent supporting people,” Aymen explains.

“Our legacy ticketing system didn’t provide the user experience we were looking for and colleagues often had to wait for a response. But replacing a ticketing system wasn’t the answer, our vision was for something much more substantial, a complete, scalable platform, with robust processes. We decided to build our future on ServiceNow.” 

Transforming its shared service organization

To meet the unique demands of the global pandemic, deploying the Now Platform at speed was vital to enabling CLToronto’s teams to continue to deliver essential services across the city to ensure people weren’t isolated and suffering from loneliness.  

“ServiceNow provided great support, to get us up and running in an emergency, and maximize the value of our investment,” says Aymen. “Making every dollar count is so important for nonprofits which rely on government funding. In the end, we launched IT Service Management in just three weeks, one of the fastest implementations on record.”

Looking back at CLToronto’s previous ways of working, Aymen describes the impact of ServiceNow as ’exponential’. “Before, getting support required many steps, and our response times were often slow—now  it’s a fast, efficient and streamlined experience, using a one-stop-shop, self-service portal.”

An extensive knowledge base and service catalogue provide instant answers to questions, about tablets or mobile devices, for example. Requests for information and support, about IT, finance, HR, payroll, and other corporate services, now reach their destination swiftly and are acted upon immediately.

“The improvement in response times is 10-fold or better. That’s providing transformational time savings for our teams, releasing them to focus on what’s most important—the people we support.”

Employee engagement has also risen significantly since the roll-out of these new workflows in the Now Platform. “Our surveys, generated automatically in ServiceNow, tell us that 95% of our colleagues value the service they receive,” says Aymen. “Issues are followed up immediately, and frequent escalations to me have completely stopped.”

Seamless integration

With the ServiceNow AI platform’s seamless integration of the front-end user experience and back-end processes, CLToronto can access all the data it needs, relating to all activities, from a single, centralized source.

“We use the data to create dashboards for internal review, to support decision making within the business. It is also used to share information with partners.

“We have data instantly available in ServiceNow about each of our buildings, how accessible they are, and health and safety arrangements in place at each.”

Delivering a consistent user experience

As CLToronto’s role as a standard bearer in Canada’s disability services sector continues to expand, Aymen has extended its Now Platform capabilities with the addition of Customer Service Management (CSM).

It uses CSM to manage its relationships with external partners in the sector, facilitating the provision of outsourced IT infrastructure and services to support smaller organizations with limited resources.

In partnership with the Ontario Government, CLToronto is also using CSM to support web and mobile applications used by the Ontario public. The goal is to replace multiple point solutions with a single consistent, scalable, high quality user experience on the Now Platform: standardizing support infrastructure and services, as well as data management capabilities.

My Community Hub event management platform, and My Direct Plan expense reimbursement application generate around 250,000 transactions a year, which also provides the data to fulfil annual auditing requirements. A third resource also moving onto ServiceNow CSM, My Job Match, is a service created for employers, job seekers with a disability, and employment support professionals to come together to track, match, and secure meaningful job opportunities.

“It’s so rewarding to support amazing work across the sector,” says Aymen. “There are potentially hundreds of organizations that can benefit from ServiceNow’s infrastructure and limitless scalability.”

Encouraging a culture of innovation

CLToronto has also extended its use of the Now Platform to encourage and capture innovation and to manage the numerous discrete projects underway within the organization. Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) provides an automated and streamlined mechanism for the many great ideas that employees have, across the organization, to be submitted, reviewed, and acted upon.

“We have a culture of innovation, everyone is encouraged to contribute suggestions,” says Aymen. “SPM provides a shared environment to capture great ideas, and a way of voting for those they feel have most merit.”

In the near future, CLToronto is contemplating expanding the use of SPM beyond Digital Services to centralize and coordinate all projects within the organization, including those related to its 80 locations and offices, predominantly in the Greater Toronto Area.

Key current projects include the Lawson Redevelopment, a landmark property redevelopment project in Toronto, designed to provide 280 new homes for people with intellectual disabilities, living in an inclusive, supported community in the heart of the city in Scarborough.

Next on the ServiceNow platform roadmap for CLToronto is IT Operations Management and IT Asset Management. “As we expand, it’s important that we have a single, integrated view of all our projects, assets, and activities in ServiceNow.

“For example, understanding our asset inventory enables more efficient management of asset lifecycles, to ensure that devices used by our frontline staff are constantly monitored and properly maintained.

“The ease with which we can constantly add new features and functionality to the platform is one of ServiceNow’s great strengths. We don’t need to jump from one platform to another.

“It allows us to scale, the user experience is very simple, streamlined, and consistent, while its back-end processes are extremely robust. That’s a very powerful combination.

“We are a completely different organization than we were even four years ago,” concludes CLToronto’s CEO Brad Saunders. “ServiceNow is the foundation of that, it’s how our staff and external partners alike interface with us. This major transformation from paper to digital in our processes, reduces time spent on administration and increases time spent on supporting people with an intellectual disability and their families. And the joy is that they are the most important beneficiaries of all of this, and the lives that we’re able to improve.”