The city of Seattle is the largest city in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, with a population of more than 750,000. It’s renowned for its leadership in technology, innovation and protecting the environment.
Jenny has been in the technology industry for three decades, and for nearly two of them she’s worked for the city of Seattle. Since 2016, she has worked with Ivanti® ITSM and ITAM solutions in the city’s Collaboration and Workplace Technologies division. All divisions in the Seattle Information Technology department prioritize effective cybersecurity to protect the city’s confidential public and employee data. They also work to efficiently serve over 50 city departments, each with its own individual IT needs, purchasing policies and approval requirements.
This in turn, improves all city employees’ IT experience to ultimately meet citizen needs. As they would all soon find, their jobs would also require doing all this amid a global pandemic.
Prior to 2016, separate IT teams within individual departments supported the technology needs of those departments — power and utilities, transportation services, parks and recreation, courts, police, fire, facilities and others. These teams were siloed and had their own tools, processes and data repositories. The result when they consolidated into one IT department? A lot of confusion, duplication of processes and efforts and poor asset management. The newly consolidated Seattle Information Technology department had challenges ahead.
Occasional efforts to take physical inventory and track assets were hard to execute. Data was difficult to maintain among disparate systems. This all led to a lack of clear ownership and accountability at all levels.
Seattle IT needed to implement standardized, shared and repeatable day-to-day processes as well as a better way to discover and track assets to get a clear idea of the hardware, applications and software it owned, how many versions were being used and how many licenses were in play.
That’s a lofty challenge when you realize the number of assets in need of management:
As a first step, the IT Service Management team adopted its newly deployed Ivanti Neurons for ITSM to bring certain IT assets into one modernized interface. This helped the Asset Management team manage these assets more efficiently with automated actions, data rules and processes providing a more accurate overview of the hardware and software assets they owned and managed.
The team started by building out the Workstation CI as a repository to consolidate “small and attractive” items such as computers and tablets, as well as building out the Enterprise Application CI as a repository to consolidate applications and software used throughout the city and supported by many separate IT teams. They consolidated various siloed repositories, numerous spreadsheets and access databases — all this while promoting Service Management across all city departments, implementing ITIL best practices and keeping pace with the changes resulting from this always-evolving IT department consolidation.
Next, they extended Neurons for ITSM by adding Ivanti Neurons for ITAM. This was driven by the need to provide further transparency to all stakeholders, from auditors to taxpayers; address issues around IT contract management, software license management and warranty tracking; and the desire to automate processes that integrated ITSM and ITAM.
According to Jenny, efficiency and accountability were the two greatest advantages of adding Ivanti Neurons for ITAM, resulting in “not only monetary and budgetary benefits but goodwill from our customers,” she says. “We charge our IT services back to the departments we serve, so we’re able to provide them clearer details of what they’re being charged for. Historically, it has been a bit fractured in terms of how that data is collected and delivered.”
What happened then was maybe the biggest surprise for Jenny and her team: the amount of advocacy they received from other IT teams. Some were hesitant at first, but the Asset Management team is now their biggest ally, regularly championing the goals of the IT Service Management team to others. “We have really nurtured some great relationships with our Asset Management team, and they’ve come on board and have been our advocates,” she says. “We set out to prove that this was going to be great, and we are delivering on that.”
In another example of improving asset management, the team installed approval guardrails within the employee IT purchasing process so requesters can see the dollar value associated with their requests. Accountability and insights available to management are increased, and the latter can be clearly organized and visualized on centralized dashboards.
City management can see the progress Seattle IT is making thanks to quicker, more precise reporting to satisfy asset audits. “The scores have continued to trend better as operational maturity levels have increased year over year,” Jenny says. Ivanti Xtraction is part of the ITSM reporting regime and will be added to the ITAM reporting regime. “When our technical staff can look at an ITSM server definition for an accurate list of all the production applications and databases it hosts, as well as network infrastructure touchpoints,” she says, “that's pretty big for these teams...that’s going to be amazing.”
The real test of these new solutions and the strategy behind them came when COVID-19 struck. As with any unanticipated major emergency, it’s vital that city departments resiliently continue to deliver essential services to the community. Seattle IT teams supported that thanks to their newfound agility.
The IT department as a whole “shifted so quickly. It was amazing what they were able to do in just a few weeks to shift nearly the entire workforce to be remote,” Jenny says. Moving to the new platforms and having an IT-centric view of their workspace provided a big advantage, given that service desk call volumes went up over 3,000%.
“If we were still on our old HEAT system during that time,” she explains, “it would have been disastrous. The new systems helped us manage work intake while the craziness happened. And then we could report on it because the analytics that came out were impressive and super helpful for the service managers and service owners.”
The city of Seattle worked heavily with Ivanti Professional Services for initial deployment and continues system development in-house and sometimes alongside IT operations provider Network Consulting Services, Inc. (NCSi). “NCSi has been a great source of talent for us to dip into when we need help and have the budget for it. They’ve been a great partner for us.”
Another resource they’ve been able to call on? Jenny and her colleagues are “strong supporters of the Ivanti Innovators Community.” She points out, “What better way to get ideas for new opportunities or to get help on some of the solutions that you're trying to implement than to ask others who have been in that situation? The Community is a great source for sharing information, and we've made some great contacts with other companies that we regularly meet with.”
Jenny’s boss, Tony Pappas, is the manager of the IT Service Management team and the local coordinator for Ivanti’s Pacific Northwest Innovators User Group. “He helps coordinate all of our events, and we host a lot of the events here at the city, where our team often presents our solutions.”
Based on what’s happened to date, Jenny feels she has a realistic vision of how much can be accomplished in just a few years. “This is going to continue to be an ever-evolving, very iterative process,” she says, “and I’m really hoping our ITAM processes become more integrated in order to see a more smoothly linked end-to-end lifecycle.”
In both ITSM and ITAM, Jenny feels automation will be a major focus with the help of web service and API integrations. Artificial intelligence is also a fast-rising technology for many government IT teams — one that Jenny thinks her own team will drive toward. “It’s coming,” she says, “whether we like it or not. AI is going to be a big thing, and we'll be learning and preparing for that.”
Note: A customer’s results are specific to its total environment/experience, of which Ivanti is a part. Individual results may vary based on each customer’s unique environment.