Adventist Health is a faith-based, non-profit integrated health delivery system providing compassionate care in California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. Founded on the Seventh-day Adventist heritage, the organization operates 20 hospitals, more than 275 clinics, 15 home-care agencies and seven hospice agencies, as well as four retirement centers as joint ventures.

An Aging Helpdesk Platform

Ivanti Help Desk has been an integral part of Adventist Health’s IT support operations for more than a decade, but the software had finally reached its limits. “We were pushing the boundaries,” recalls Wendell Bobst, Assistant Vice President of Information Technology Customer Services at Adventist Health.

The organization set out to look for a modern service management platform that could be tailored to the challenges of supporting the IT and clinical processes of a 23,000-employee operation. “We wanted to build a path to more effective support, better clarity of work types, and improved customer service,” says Bobst. The goal was to find a cost-effective approach to upgrading to a modern platform.

Ivanti met our three objectives: the opportunity to do a migration rather than an outright build, to clearly differentiate worktype requests, and a platform to enhance our core IT processes. — Wendell Bobst

With these goals in mind, Adventist Health approached Ivanti about upgrading to the current Ivanti platform. Ivanti offered Adventist Health new programs and tools specifically designed to facilitate a progression from “classic” Ivanti to Ivanti Service Manager, either in the cloud or on-premise, while leveraging its current configurations and data.

One of the key criteria for the decision was the ability to differentiate between “break/fix” incidents and new service requests, which were distinguished by a different priority in “classic” Ivanti Help Desk. This serves as the foundation to design, build, and monitor service agreements through their lifecycle.

Setting the Migration Strategy

Bobst considered two approaches. “We considered several variations using the new Call Logging module; however, these always included a subsequent change to Ivanti Service Manager. The process improvements we needed led to the decision to build and implement Incident and Service Request in the new platform,” he says.

Adventist Health chose a multi-phase approach to migration, rather than waiting for the big bang of perfect deployment.

Says Bobst, “Call Logging appears to be great for IT environments that don’t want to make a big change. They can wash their hands of hardware and software and go to the cloud. They don’t need to spend a long time learning a new platform.”

While not implemented as initially anticipated, Call Logging will serve a critical purpose. “Our archive strategy is to convert all of the old tickets to Call Logging, so we will continue to have access for analysis, reporting, and auditing,” Bobst says.

A Plan for Continuous Improvements

Incident management and service requests are just the beginning. “We’ll have multiple go-lives over the course of the year as we package up consumable processes and educate the team on the opportunities to deliver more business value,” Bobst says.

Today, Ivanti is used by approximately 650 IT staff primarily to support IT service management. Adventist Health wanted to ensure its new platform would facilitate the creation, usage, and ongoing support of workflows that would provide the services needed by IT and other departments.

One area of opportunity is the ticket management process within the clinical information systems. “Clinical teams have the most complex processes that they wanted to improve,” he says. “The integrated tools and workflow should be a great addition for our customers.”

One of the great things about the Ivanti team is that they listen to the customer but also give advice. — Wendell Bobst

The IT team is updating its service catalog, and with 800 “skeletal” service requests the team is using the native tools to develop friendly, user-facing service requests.

These range in complexity, and “some can be done in hours and some take weeks,” Bobst notes.

Knowledge and problem management are next. With the basics of knowledge management in place, IT can offer self service. “Knowledge is a lifelong endeavor,” says Bobst. “We also expect Change Management to provide a significant improvement as we lack an integrated solution that requires duplication.”

A Strong Relationship

Finding the right balance between having a service management platform that fits the way the organization works – without getting locked in with a solution that’s too customized – was a priority. The Adventist Health team worked closely with the Ivanti professional services team to determine the best design. “We’re trying to stick close to the build model, so we don’t go too far out of the box,” Bobst says. “We don’t want to be so far out of the box that every time there’s an update I have to prep for three weeks.”

“Adventist Health has a trusted relationship with the team at Ivanti. One of the great things about the Ivanti team is that they listen to the customer but also give us advice,” Bobst says. He sees a broader benefit of working with the Ivanti professional services team. “Whatever development I pay for, I’d like to see it driven back into the product so that it becomes out-of-the-box when I consume it.”

And that partnership is enabling Adventist Health to continually improve IT support services and deliver superior care to the communities it serves.