Warwickshire County Council reduces overheads and downtime with Hornbill Supportworks

Hornbill IT service management system selected ahead of Marval; still preferred ahead of SaaS alternatives

Warwickshire County Council has reduced overheads and downtime with Hornbill's ITSM Supportworks.

Keith Hattee, change and development manager at the council, told Computing that in 2008 it used Frontrange's Heat call-logging system. But as Hattee had been to some Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) training sessions, and was enthused with IT service management (ITSM), the council started to look for a product that could help it to use the ITIL framework, something that the Heat product was not suitable for.

"We went out to tender at that stage, with a number of companies involved. Eventually we narrowed this down to three vendors: Hornbill, Marval and Touchpaper. We got them to demonstrate the products in the morning and in the afternoon our service desk staff tested out the products, with Hornbill coming out as the clear winner," Hattee said.

What the council has accomplished so far

As an organisation, Hattee explained, Warwickshire had two different departments offering IT services, but it wanted them to become one department. The first department offered IT services to schools and the other offered IT services to "corporate" internal departments.

The schools were using a different helpdesk system, and the council shifted it to Hornbill's system for consistency and ease of use.

"There were two service desks and now there is physically only one as the schools are just a separate team from the council's service desk, as opposed to two separate service desks," he stated.

This meant a reduction in staff numbers, resulting in savings for the council.

The council was also able to provide schools and its corporate staff with a self-service function.

"The schools had self-service ability through their previous product, so we had to provide them with a similar or better experience, which I think we've certainly achieved. We're increasing the amount of self-service use, particularly from the corporate side; defining those business services in a way in which we can fulfil more requests," he said.

Subsequently, Warwickshire has routed 15 per cent of calls through the self-service module over the past three years. In the past year it has achieved a 10 per cent reduction in calls to the service desk, saving the organisation's employees' time.

Warwickshire County Council reduces overheads and downtime with Hornbill Supportworks

Hornbill IT service management system selected ahead of Marval; still preferred ahead of SaaS alternatives

Warwickshire has an ITSM team of 20 and, after implementing many of Hornbill's tools, including incident, problem, change and service level management, the council decided in 2011 to update its configuration management database (CMDB).

"We've got over 41,000 active configuration items now and they are all mapped together from end to end on a technical level. If we do have to make changes or have issues with a particular piece of kit, we can identify what services it will impact down the line. Our impact assessment is much easier than what we were previously able to do," Hattee said.

Warwickshire now creates all of its IT projects as a configuration item, including its switch to Windows 7.

"So if any calls were logged for Windows 7 in the early stages we would associate that project with it. So you can get a view of Windows 7 as a project and how many incidents it might have incurred, and what changes were being put through to fix the problems.

"It also enabled the service desk to spot straight away that a user had an update on their machine as part of the project, and that it might just be something to do with a new operating system," Hatte said.

The future

The next step for the council is to use its service catalogue to map business services to the technical services so that it can keep customers better informed on who is actually using specific services.

Hattee explained that the council is always keeping an eye on the market, but that Hornbill is still the best fit for Warwickshire County Council.

"The cloud can potentially save us money and Hornbill do have a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering now, but we believe that the infrastructure that we've got internally at the moment is sufficient for our needs and doesn't cost a lot, so we're not necessarily looking at [changing the solution]," he said.