Today, the office delivers better financial data to the governor and legislative branches, allowing for better financial planning and budgeting

Government agencies face the same challenges as their corporate counterparts. Leadership must decide how to fund multiple departments while staying within the company budget. Teams must report on how they manage those budgets so that leaders can determine allocations for the following year. It’s a never-ending cycle typically involving manual processes varying from department to department.

State governments are complex systems of agencies and offices that supply services to their citizens. Offices of transportation, health and human services, agriculture, education, commerce and courts, among dozens of other agencies, support our elected officials in running our state governments. Similar structures make up our municipalities and county governments. These offices ensure citizens can access services from paying taxes to receiving help from the agencies their taxes support.

An essential piece of this puzzle is the state’s financial office. The head of this office plays a crucial role in helping elected officials decide how a state distributes funds. The reports generated by their department inform policy for both the legislative and executive branches—a job that requires accuracy, efficiency and attention to detail. Lack of visibility into operations, siloed systems, redundancies and less-than-optimal data security protocols often impede progress. One such agency in a western U.S. state decided to use its existing ServiceNow instance to address these challenges.

The Partnership

The agency initially engaged Crossfuze in a successful ServiceNow ITSM implementation. Their immediate success with the Now Platform® encouraged agency leadership to look for new ways ServiceNow could streamline their department. Leadership knew ServiceNow had capabilities that extended beyond the service desk. They also knew the platform could deliver data on IT operations that would help higher-level leaders. The goal for the next phase of their ServiceNow journey was to mature Discovery and enable proper classification of CIs (Configuration Items). They also wanted to evolve how they used their CMDB (Configuration Management Database) to ensure accurate validation of the current CSDM (Common Services Data Model), reduce steps to move data to the cloud and protect tickets containing sensitive information within ServiceNow.

This was the second step on the agency’s digital transformation journey with Crossfuze. Department leaders were confident in Crossfuze’s approach, which started with a deep understanding of the agency’s current operations. Using that information as a foundation, the Crossfuze team made recommendations to help the team decide where to move next with their digital transformation strategy.

The Strategy

The teams created an ITOM strategy that exceeded the agency’s goals. They gathered information from department leaders to apply best practices to the ServiceNow instance, including using Service Mapping to migrate existing CMDB data to properly align to the Common Services Data Model (CSDM) and establish a solid foundation. They configured the CMDB to align with other platform capabilities fully.

Crossfuze helped the agency end the manual loading of CIs and associated data by enabling configuration for the Discovery of IT CIs and related data. Their guided client setup of ACC (Agent Client Collector) Agent on targeted devices increased efficiencies by reducing the steps in populating ServiceNow. The newly completed integration allows the segregation and routing of tickets containing confidential information to the right teams— eliminating the need to work outside ServiceNow to process sensitive tickets.

The firm is well equipped to serve itself and develop more solutions in the future. App Engine has empowered the team to develop additional applications to streamline its operations.

The Result

Laying the foundation for streamlined IT Operations with ServiceNow ITOM and CMDB streamlined systems boosted data security and reduced costs for this state agency. Today, the office delivers better financial data to the governor and legislative branches, allowing for better financial planning and budgeting. By connecting silos and cutting bureaucratic red tape, the office operated more efficiently and transparently to deliver accurate financials to the elected officials. In turn, those officials can develop policies that better reflect the state’s needs.

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