Advansys Formativ Success Story
Advansys Formativ Success Story
New South Wales Department of Commerce - CCSU uses Advansys Formativ and GroupWise® to roll out centralized incident and request management process for all CCSU client agencies and staff.
"With their great product, Formativ, combined with rapid custom Formativ Applet development services, Advansys provided everything we needed to rapidly implement an integrated service delivery process on Novell GroupWise."
David C. Lloyd
Service Centre Project Manager
Shared Services Excellence Program
Central Corporate Services Unit
NSW Department of Commerce
Background
The New South Wales Department of Commerce is the government agency whose role is to make doing business in New South Wales, Australia, simple, accessible and fair for employees, consumers and industry, while providing best value for government. The Central Corporate Services Unit (CCSU) of the New South Wales Department of Commerce provides administrative and technical support to 38 government agencies, which includes high-profile departments such as the NSW Premier's Department and NSW Treasury.
Situation before Advansys solution
In 2002, CCSU recognized that each of its service lines had a unique set of processes, procedures and contact points for managing CCSU client and staff incident and service requests. Inefficient, inconsistent silo approaches to service delivery from CCSU to its clients were found to be common. Client feedback also drew attention to CCSU's ad-hoc service delivery model. For example, clients noted dissatisfaction with information they were receiving about their incident or service requests. In addition, clients could not always guarantee the quality of service received from any Branch of CCSU. All too often the most effective interactions were based on last-minute personal interactions, phone calls or email exchanges.
Reviews of the existing CCSU IT Help Desk were conducted by Client Services Managers. These reviews identified a need for a managed Service Center to incorporate CCSU's service lines and provide a central point of contact, a consistent approach, and quality service delivery to all clients. The Service Centre project was established in November, 2002 to implement a service framework, procedures, and request management and monitoring tools across CCSU to support its goal of becoming a best-value supplier of shared services to the NSW public sector.
Situation after Advansys solution
"All of NSW's 2,500 IT clients use Novell GroupWise and a browser, so it was the most obvious choice to implement and host forms to support the Service Center project," said David Lloyd, Project Manager for the CCSU Shared Services Excellence Program. "Advansys and its products are also well known to our Novell GroupWise administrator, which made the choice of the Formativ product simple."
The CCSU Service Centre was launched in June 2003, providing a tool to enable central logging, handling, monitoring and reporting of CCSU Clients' incidents and service requests. Points of contact were established for NSW HR, IT and Office Services Requests, and additional contact points for Finance, RAIS (Research and Information Service) and Executive branches were added in November 2003. "Our main objective for the project was to provide low-cost, client-centered access to CCSU's services from integrated access points," said Lloyd. "A significant business driver for implementing the Service Center was the need to ensure that common processes for CCSU clients' interactions were put in place, and it was vital to extend the project to all of the small agencies without the resources to do this themselves."
CCSU used a comprehensive service management tool, Datawatch VisualQSM* Service Management Portal, to enable central logging, handling and monitoring of incidents and service requests. The portal supports monitoring and reporting on workload in order to provide CCSU and client agencies with business management reports, identification of appropriate resource levels for service offerings into the future, and proactive management of service issues. Formativ applet submission forms are sent via flat-text email into Visual QSM. The Visual QSM daemon takes keywords and processes them into a request which is surfaced in the portal.
"Formativ delivers on the Advansys vision of providing a simple, yet powerful, solutions platform for the GroupWise community, including the NSW CCSU", said Greg Bell, Advansys Managing Director. "Leveraging Formativ's portal technology, a custom Formativ applet provides a front-end service request form, which collects user initiated service request data and routes it to the CCSU central help desk management system. However, with Formativ, any developer or power user has the means to build GroupWise solutions just as quickly and easily. Organizations can now fully leverage their GroupWise investments while simultaneously increasing user satisfaction. Building on a solid foundation of enterprise automation and productivity enhancement systems, Advansys has developed solutions for GroupWise for many years, resulting in a deep understanding of the GroupWise product and its many potential applications"
Results
"From my point of view, the foundation is now in place for CCSU to be a proactive and cost-effective client services provider," said Lloyd. "We now have an overall view of what are we doing on behalf of each individual client. One of the key concerns of the project has been to address the silo factor of providing services to multiple client organizations. The Formativ solution combines seamlessly with GroupWise to provide a structured series of forms-based tools and messaging resources that enable consistent service delivery. All CCSU clients now have the ability to log CCSU Requests via GroupWise through the CCSU Request Form, or via phone."
"The Service Center project has been very well received by clients, and provides the ability to monitor service levels against agreed client performance targets," continued Lloyd. "In addition, the project has improved the ability of CCSU's Executive and Branch management to understand branch activities and activity drivers and allow more efficient request allocation to CCSU staff. All CCSU clients now enjoy streamlined access to services, a central point of contact, and the ability to log requests directly into the system and to track the status of their requests. Clients will also be able to generate reports to monitor CCSU's service levels against their unique performance targets."
Conclusion
"Thanks to GroupWise and Formativ, we've been very successful in completing the first two phases of this project," noted Lloyd. "Our team created the initial business requirements in November 2002, a pilot deployment to March 2003, and a full rollout of Phase 1 was completed in July 2003. We've just completed the second phase. A client survey conducted after Phase 1 delivery provided formal feedback, and the project team worked hard to implement 19 key client recommendations, including an online help facility, and improvements to client service delivery training for CCSU staff. "
"Formativ provides a forms-based processing environment for GroupWise that has proven instrumental to the success of the entire project," concluded Lloyd. "Advansys also provided value-added development services because there were no in-house developers involved in the project. CCSU simply provided the requirements, and Advansys quickly provided custom Formativ applets which plugged right into CCSU's GroupWise system. And CCSU intends to leverage Formativ to add more solutions as time progresses."