{"id":446,"date":"2019-04-12T08:35:41","date_gmt":"2019-04-12T07:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.dorsetforyou.gov.uk\/digital-first\/?p=446"},"modified":"2019-04-12T08:35:41","modified_gmt":"2019-04-12T07:35:41","slug":"improving-our-ict-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk\/digital-first\/2019\/04\/12\/improving-our-ict-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving our ICT Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

In ICT Services we provide support to our workforce and schools looking after a computer network that connects 188 sites including 41 traffic signals, 330 applications and approx. 5100 devices (laptops, tablets, desktops).\u00a0 Each week we receive around 855 calls for help and 161 requests for new work.\u00a0 Some years ago we enabled people to log problems and requests online, recently we have been exploring ways by which we can automate our processes and improve our service.<\/p>\n

Work took place to consider technologies that would help us do this and the Microsoft System Centre Service Manager product was selected as it could help streamline processes, reduce delivery time to customers, and along with Cireson technology provide a new user portal for customers to contact us.<\/p>\n

Importantly, Service Manager provides an integrated platform for automating and adapting IT service management best practices, we use Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and it provides built-in processes for incident and problem resolution, change control, and asset lifecycle management.<\/p>\n

Approach taken to delivery<\/b><\/p>\n

We adopted agile techniques to help deliver the work, this included twice weekly stand ups, SPRINT planning, and show and tells to keep our customers and people working in ICT informed of how the work was evolving.<\/p>\n

A design-led approach was taken starting with understanding our user’s needs and clarifying the problems\/opportunities for improvement.\u00a0 Story boards and videos from a user perspective were developed to help explain different processes, these were really effective in communicating what we wanted to achieve. We developed prototypes using the test system and this played a huge part in helping to ensure we understood what people needed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

System Manager was delivered with default settings applied, work has taken place to review and amend these based on our user needs.\u00a0 We had to up-skill members of the\u00a0 Service with Powershell, Java and HTML skills to do this.<\/p>\n

One of our key priorities was to automate the new starter process as much as possible based on the areas that were causing us the most pain.\u00a0 We are learning as we go to build the automation’s and this is an area that we will continue to develop.<\/p>\n

Go Live<\/b><\/p>\n

We started by introducing a new change process so that people in ICT could familiarise themselves with the product before we released it to our customers.\u00a0 This was very straightforward.<\/p>\n

Last week we went live with our new customer portal and the ICT help desk logging incidents.\u00a0 We expect to further reduce the call logging time for our help desk staff later in the year when new functionality is released by Cireson.\u00a0 Early feedback is the portal is clean, fresh looking and easier to use.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Asset management is being used to ensure the correct devices are assigned to the right user, giving us better control and management of our assets.\u00a0 <\/b>The overall time taken to book in multiple items has reduced from a couple days down to a couple hours.<\/p>\n

Types of benefits we are expecting<\/b><\/p>\n

Now we are starting to release functionality we are hoping to see:<\/p>\n