Case Study

A Next-Generation CSX for a Modern Military Agency

Our client, a research and development agency for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) sought to improve customer service experience and automating workflows while maintaining continuity of operations and services at full performance levels. Windward helped them deploy ServiceNow as a single platform to manage IT configurations, assets and business processes.
Windward Planes
Goals

The primary objectives were ensuring sustained and improved classified IT capabilities. It was critical that continuity of operations and services be maintained at full performance levels.

The agency sought to improve customer service experience when interacting with the team dedicated to resolving their needs. They knew streamlining their internal systems would necessitate automating requirements, and breaking through some of the support teams’ challenges. Stakeholders knew they couldn’t “do things the way they have always been done” and understood that automating workflows could save time and money now and in the future.

Challenges

Windward was tasked with improving the flow between the organization’s high side secure and classified environment and the low side unclassified environment. A Remedy ITSM ticketing system was only available on the low side for handling unclassified information.

Tickets would be created in Remedy but couldn’t capture all details from high side incidents. Conversely, no Remedy tickets were coming over to the high side, only assets and CI’s. The high side network needed control over their own workflow and communication between the two.

In addition, stakeholders had little-to-no visibility into ITSM operations and couldn’t execute Change Management, Asset Management or Asset Tracking. This meant a lot of manual work.

Solutions

Windward worked with the client to formulate a solution. We suggested installing a new ServiceNow instance on the high side, to facilitate information transfer and continuous workflow. We would install and configure ServiceNow on their classified network and implement these ServiceNow modules:

  • CMDB, to provide business context of implemented IT products and configurations
  • Incident Management, to capture classified information for rapid restoration of customer services
  • Change Management, to control configuration changes within the classified networks
  • Asset Management, to enable good stewardship of owned IT products
  • Knowledge Management, to focus knowledge sharing into a single authoritative source
  • Financial Planning, to clarify understanding of IT service delivery costs and manage effectively
  • Demand Management, to collect and prioritize potential courses of action
  • Resource Management, to efficiently allocate worker resources and understand skillset bottlenecks
  • Performance Analytics, to manage the business services from a single set of performance metrics

Windward readied implementation, launched it into production, and provided early lifecycle support to ensure implementation success. We successfully delivered knowledge transfer to ServiceNow’s technical support team to assist the agency in the future, and advised the classified support organization on ServiceNow roadmap planning.

Results

The client now has a single platform to manage IT configurations, assets and business processes on the classified network. ServiceNow will allow for process automation, saving time and effort across departments. The operation has seen dramatic efficiency and visibility improvements, and is self-sufficient in owning the platform and realizing value now and far into the future.