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How Washington State Consolidated Five Departments into One

Mergers are never easy. But the Department of Enterprise Services was able to survive, thanks to good planning and a cloud-based IT service management solution.

What happens when you consolidate the IT shops from five different state agencies into one new department? The Washington State Department of Enterprise Services, created in 2011, struggled with that question when it merged operations from a variety of agencies that ranged from purchasing IT to negotiating building leases, maintaining the capitol grounds, recruiting and training the state's workforce, and designing and printing publications.

"The five separate departments of five separate IT shops were consolidated into the DES," said Nick Fuchs, CTO and chief information security officer, for DES. The problem, according to Fuchs, was that DES was also merging five different ways of doing business into one entity, with the goal of creating a single place for all state employees to resolve issues.

Centralization at that scale required an IT Service Management (ITSM) solution that could be flexible, yet customizable and scalable. In addition, it needed to support almost 150 enterprise software applications across multiple departments.

DES evaluated eight different vendors and ended up choosing a SaaS-based system from EasyVista to automate workflow processes and equip analysts and technicians with tools to log and resolve technical inquiries. The cloud-based platform also coordinates functions and asset discovery across departments and locations.

DES’s 200-plus analysts and technicians are able to directly support 2,000 government personnel involved in the running of HR, payroll and other applications, as well as the 65,000 state employees who rely on DES' services.

For example, when an employee is hired, the platform orchestrates the employee's needs for desk, phone, computer, network and other services. In addition, it can be used to ensure that user and access profiles for the many core and critical applications used by individuals, groups and departments are correctly mapped and profiled.

The biggest challenge with using such a new ITSM, according to Fuchs, was getting staff to become comfortable with a standardized process that differed from how it had been done before in their individual departments. "To address this, we communicated more than we had in the past," said Fuchs. "For example, we did some classroom training at the beginning, before we even went live with it." 

"We also implemented the solution in pieces," Fuchs added. "One benefit was that the solution is very modular, so we implemented the workflows one at a time. As we got to a certain area, we made sure we were involving all of the stakeholders in making decisions about how that piece of the solution would be configured."

The biggest benefit from the centralized ITSM has been the ability to coordinate work by breaking down silos. "In the past, we were reliant on people to make sure they communicated with the right people for certain activities," he said. For example, when a new employee started and needed a computer, a desk, a chair and a phone, the supervisor had to remember to call the various divisions to make sure everything was covered. Today, all of these requirements are built into an electronic workflow, which automatically creates actions for all of the groups that need to participate in the process. What once took a few days now requires a few hours," Fuchs said.

In the future, DES plans to use its new ITSM to automate contracts and purchasing processes, as well as other activities within budget and finance. "Anything you can create a workflow for, EasyVista can help manage that," Fuchs said. "It's not just about IT."