Washington State Dept of Health slashes IT service delivery times in half

Washington State’s DOH offers programs to help prevent illness and injury and promote healthy places to live and work
The Washington State Department of Health (DOH) protects and improves the health of people In Washington State. Its programs help to prevent illness and injury, promote healthy places to live and work, help people to make good health decisions, and ensure that the state is prepared for emergencies. The department administers a budget of $1.2 billion, 66% of which is invested in the community through other organizations.

Areas that the department is active in include drinking water, food safety and radiation protection, rural health, public health laboratories, communicable disease control, health professional credentialing, emergency preparedness and response, and women, infants, and children nutrition.

To better serve customers, the DOH wanted to make IT easy to use, transparent, and cost-effective
All of these areas depend on IT. The department’s IT team is committed to providing responsive support for its customers, delivering the services that other teams need to execute the department’s mission effectively. That’s why the IT team launched a far-reaching transformation program, moving to what it refers to as an IT-as-a-Service model.

According to Amy Wilson, DOH’s enterprise system support supervisor, “We wanted to run IT as a business, creating products and services that are tailored to meet our customers’ needs. With IT-as-a-Service, customers choose services from a catalog of service offerings and only pay for what they use. Our goal is to make IT easy to use, transparent, and cost-effective–strengthening the department’s efforts to serve the people of Washington State.”

With ServiceNow, the DOH adopts IT-as-a-Service and retires multiple systems from more than 20 different programs and services
However, DOH faced a major challenge. While it was committed to IT-as-a- Service, it didn’t have the service delivery platform it needed to succeed. Amy says, “We were struggling with multiple ticketing systems. In some cases, we didn’t have a ticketing system at all—just an email inbox for requests. There wasn’t one place to go for IT services, and our customers were dissatisfied because these systems were so cumbersome to use. And, because everything was disconnected, we couldn’t provide cost transparency, and we didn’t have the end-to-end visibility we needed to drive continual service improvement.”

To lay the foundation for success, DOH decided to partner with ServiceNow. The department went live with an initial ServiceNow IT Service Management solution that included Incident, Asset, Configuration, Change, Request and Knowledge Management—allowing it to retire various request systems used in more than 20 different programs and services.

Amy says, “We started with 25 request workflows across IT, facilities, and HR. Bringing on facilities and HR as business partners was a top priority since services such as employee onboarding and workspace moves don’t just involve IT. To deliver seamless service, you need to coordinate activities across the organization.”

“We saw immediate results. Incident Management in particular was a huge success with our end users,” says Amy. “And, we could finally measure our service delivery. Before, we had no easy way to track metrics, which made continuous improvement almost impossible.”

Effective platform governance drives continuous improvement at DOH—delivering better business outcomes, increased responsiveness, reduced costs, and higher customer satisfaction
Armed with this visibility, DOH’s IT team tackled the next phase of its IT-as-a- Service journey. It established a Continuous Service Improvement (CSI) program to operationalize ongoing service improvement within a well-defined enterprise systems governance framework.

Tiffany Escott, DOH’s continuous service improvement owner, explains, “We needed a process to prioritize service delivery improvements so that we could align our efforts with our organization’s mission and goals. This would allow us to deliver better business outcomes, increase responsiveness, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction. Again, this is where ServiceNow helped. We were able to take existing processes from the ServiceNow®  Champion Enablement site and adapt them to meet our needs.”

Tiffany continues, “However, that process couldn’t exist in a vacuum. To ensure ongoing leadership support, we needed an enterprise systems governance model that would drive our vision, help our leadership to understand key decisions, and establish clear roles and responsibilities. So, we built a structured framework to do this.”

“The foundation of this model is our service owners and customers, who help us to identify and prioritize improvement opportunities. These then go to our steering committee, which is made up of agency leaders who represent the interests and concerns of their divisions and constituents,” says Tiffany.

“The steering committee evaluates these opportunities against our strategy and roadmap, providing recommendations to our top-level IT Governance Group for validation and approval. The enterprise release management team then carries out a technical assessment and suggests possible solutions based on ServiceNow and ITIL best practices, with the IT solutions team providing oversight for standards and compliance with enterprise architecture.”

DOH delivers nearly 600 improvements, 100% faster service delivery, and 90% customer satisfaction
Using this model, DOH made nearly 600 improvements to its ServiceNow deployment within the first year—everything from minor changes through to complete new services. Amy says, “We’ve been incredibly successful improving services for our customers and fulfillers. We now have more than 90 service request workflows, more than three times our initial 25. "We’ve slashed our average service delivery times by 50% from six days to three days, and we’ve now got 66% adoption for our self-service portal. And, even more important, customer satisfaction has risen from 77% to 90%.”

DOH plans to extend ServiceNow across the organization to manage and track grants and contracts with federal, public, and private entities
Looking forward, DOH will continue to drive new IT service improvements with CSI. Developing custom applications is also high on its agenda, leveraging the benefits of its “IT-as-a-Service” model across the entire organization. For example, it plans to use ServiceNow to manage and track grants and contracts with federal, public, and private entities.

Tiffany sums it up, “By leveraging ServiceNow and our CSI process, we are constantly improving service delivery. That is helping the Department of Health to execute its core mission of protecting and improving the health of the people of Washington State. As we expand our service-centric approach beyond IT, we expect these benefits to accelerate.”

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