Federal Agency Sees Vast Improvements by Bringing a Hosted Solution In-House

Challenge

A large federal law enforcement agency was experiencing challenges with its ServiceNow solution hosted externally by a managed service provider (MSP). Issues included inconsistent data quality stemming from siloed data sources, lengthy fulfilment times for requested enhancements, and difficulty making IT services management changes because of historical design decisions. Many of its HR business processes had to be performed manually across various systems and platforms, which made collaboration difficult and undermined efficiency.

The agency sought to bring the ServiceNow solution in-house where direct ownership would enable the agency to cleanse and unify its data, automate and streamline manual workflow processes, and improve IT service management. Having direct control also would enable the agency to install a more recent version of ServiceNow, utilize more out-of-the-box features, and align with ServiceNow best practices.

Approach

Guidehouse was engaged to migrate the ServiceNow application from the MSP’s shared platform to a client owned solution. The migration included the following steps:

• Resolved discrepancies in legacy system records via a data migration and cleansing effort
• Implemented incident management to restore services faster with intelligent routing and built-in collaboration
• Added change management functionalities which improved processes by automating approvals
• Implemented problem management processes to identify the root cause of issues and proactively prevent future disruptions
• Launched a new employee self-service portal offering products and services in a modern user-friendly storefront
• Migrated service-level agreements (SLAs) from a managed service provider to an enterprise instance to enable provider-customer commitments to meet or exceed service levels.

Impact

Bringing the ServiceNow solution in-house enabled the agency to realize significant improvements. The agency was able to use more of ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box features and align with ServiceNow best practices. Direct ownership also enabled the agency to understand bottlenecks in its processes and improve processes directly rather than relying on a third party.

Operational improvements included:

• Streamlined workflows and reduced service request times. Changes that had taken four days were able to be fulfilled in one day
• Improved data quality by eliminating conflicting records and consolidating data sources — A 99%+ alignment in datasets was achieved, representing a net-positive improvement to the integrity of the data
• Reduced custom code and using more out-of-the box ServiceNow features improved IT service management
• Eliminated disconnected HR processes by creating a self-service portal that enabled users to access HR services and initiate HR processes