Hull City Council Rolls Out Comprehensive Service Desk Support Solution to Entire Organization

January 22, 2009

Council saves three terabytes of server space, freeing up one-third of the organization’s storage capacity; Solution delivers shared services to more than 14,000 people; 78 percent of Service Requests are now logged online versus 15 percent prior to implementation

Axios Systems, one of the world’s leading providers of IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, recognizes the support delivery success of one of the UK’s most progressive local government organizations serving 250,000 constituents. The council uses a single system, assyst by Axios Systems, to manage services delivered by numerous operational areas, including ICT, HR, Procurement, Operational Safety, Door Entry, Administration, Building Cleaning as well as numerous other support functions. Further, more than 78 percent of Service Requests are now submitted online, a significant increase on the 15 percent level being achieved prior to installing the new software solution.

Handling around 500 calls, emails and web-requests daily, the Service Desk at Hull City Council is highly focused on cost, quality and timeliness, in a bid to manage and raise service levels and ultimately deliver competitive services.

Part of the service improvement initiative has involved putting a strong CMDB in place that has allowed the council to consolidate a large number of previously disparate databases. This has led other functions outside of IT to also use assyst to align with the needs of the business.

This is best highlighted with regards to the council’s employee data. Prior to adopting the shared services model, employee data was held on multiple systems, leading to data inaccuracies. Now the data is located in one central CMDB and if, for example, an employee leaves the organization, the leave date is fed into the user’s profile as a configuration item (CI). The Service Desk then automatically starts a predefined leavers’ process by creating a service call, which is picked up and processed directly, disabling accounts and moving personal data to a holding area and enabling managers to request access if necessary.

Steve Moffat, Infrastructure Strategy Principal Officer at Hull City Council says, “Having identified core data, we are able to share this across the Service Desk and now have the ability to filter information utilizing Customer Service Groups (CSGs). This allows us to display only appropriate HR details to the Service Desk, ensuring protection of sensitive data. By having accurate user information, we can remove users rapidly from other ICT systems with a full audit trail being held within the Service Desk."

Moffat continues, "Automatically disabling accounts saves time and improves IT security. It also reduces IT storage requirements, saving us money. In fact, since deploying assyst, the technology team has been able to delete so many obsolete files, it has freed up one-third of our allocated storage space, releasing over three terabytes of data stored in servers."

Tasos Symeonides, CEO of Axios Systems says, "The success we have witnessed at Hull City Council clearly demonstrates the benefits organizations can reap by adopting the shared services model. We believe a growing number of businesses and public sector entities will look to shared services initiatives in the drive for cost reductions in the current economic climate."

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