Transforming the Department for International Trade

Back Office Digital Transformation and Solutions

Enabling access from cloud-based commodity service desktops to legacy applications in elevated security domains.

The Challenge

The current support is managed by an incumbent 3rd party supplier, who has outsourced services to additional providers which add complexity and lag in the service. The customer help desk support is provided with multiple escalation points and handoffs. Along with these complexities asset management processes and records in place including hardware, applications and tracking were very inaccurate and poorly managed spreadsheets.

Throughout the discovery phase, we realised that the Movers Leavers Joiners process was ineffective – due to the reliance on paper-based processes. These processes are not joined up as the business works in silos i.e. HR and Finance do not combine their systems, instead, they use multiple separate spreadsheets/databases.

The net impact is an overly complex, disjointed and costly support model that provides a poor user experience and very little value for money.

I have been really impressed with how quickly issues can now be addressed and resolved.

Programme Director – The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy

The Process

We used lean thinking to focus on increasing the value of the business and users by eliminating old processes with the use of an outside-in approach to understanding the problems.

It allowed us to develop an idealised and user-centric design that ensures an accessible and inclusive process/solutions. We worked with ServiceNow to develop a Self Service model for users that focus on IT asset uptime instead of slow moving tickets. The introduction of a Self-Service Knowledge base was to help upskill users and prevent repeat incidents occurring. There was an introduction of a chat functionality with the ability to have a ‘remote control’ functionality for the support team. We leveraged on the current service management staff experience to streamline and build a ServiceNow development capability in-house. This will allow for constant updates to the service which in turn fosters a continuous improvement culture.

The Outcome

The outcome was an implementation of intuitive customer-centric processes to enhance the user experience which improved new starter experience through joined up processes with HR, Finance and other business functions to ensure a seamless IT onboarding process. It enables an improvement of relationships between departments through collaborative working and an understanding of how the joined up processes works. It also allowed for an on-site capability to continuously develop workflows and process automation:

– Increased simplicity and stability of architecture leading to fewer faults and increased fix rate.

– A simplified architecture means simplified processes and a faster reliable and efficient change process.

– Increased employee and end-user satisfaction.

– Increased talent attraction and retention.

– A decrease in licenses and contracts cost per user – due to consolidation, deduplication and negotiation of better deals for suppliers.

A decrease in support costs per user – due to the consolidation of disparate IT support functions and a lower ratio of IT support staff required due to the increase in a self-help functionality and increased stability of the implemented architecture.