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Collaborative Service Management Application Will Improve Flexibility And Performance While Reducing Operating Costs

London, 3 March 2015 Aylesbury Vale District Council (AVDC), which serves over 174,000 people across north Buckinghamshire, has deployed Hornbill Service Manager, an innovative collaborative service management application, to support the council’s move to modernise ITSM operations and use new working practices to simplify and optimise IT service delivery. The 100% Cloud based service provides full service management capabilities that allow AVDC to significantly reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs to support its staff. Deploying in the Cloud, meant that the service was up and running and AVDC staff were benefitting from Service Manager’s capabilities within days.

“Our switch to Hornbill Service Manager gives us the ability to modernise our IT service Management operations and adopt a fresh approach that blends the most effective principles from traditional best-practice, with innovative collaborative technologies,” said Adam Haylock, IT Service Delivery Manager at Aylesbury Vale District Council. “With Hornbill Service Manager we can enhance the capabilities of our previous, on-premise Hornbill solution, while improving flexibility and reducing the costs and complexity of on-site infrastructure, management and software upgrades. Removing the need for servers, SQL licenses and backup costs has already made the project cost-neutral and we will see further savings in staff time as the project continues.”

In April 2012, AVDC began plans to move from multiple offices in the district to a single location on the outskirts of Aylesbury town centre. At the same time, it planned a complete refresh of its IT strategy and environment; moving to a more flexible, lower-cost cloud-based infrastructure allowing workers to access services from any location. The council was one of the first in the country to move to Amazon Web Services, and is dedicated to only procuring cloud-based IT services, such as Microsoft Office 365.

AVDC had used Hornbill’s Supportworks on-premise ITSM solution since 2008. When it decided to change to a cloud-based ITSM tool as part of its IT refresh, the tendering process identified Hornbill Service Manager as the best possible replacement, offering the perfect combination of innovative capabilities and industry best practice. Innovations like progressive capture help us secure the right data on customer issues during call creation, and its business process capabilities ensure correct procedures are followed The Service Desk team can now work collaboratively and secure expert help and assistance within the organisation to provide faster resolution to issues. The entire migration from Supportworks to Hornbill Service Manager was implemented by AVDC Project Manager Kirsten Shaw, in just 30 days. Hornbill provides their “Switch-On” service free of charge which includes configuring SSO, Importing user, customer and asset data, creating some business process and reports and dashboards, all delivered quickly and effortlessly. Being able to deliver on this demonstrates the ease of implementation as well as the simplicity of deployment of the solution.

“If there was a better product we would have considered it, but Hornbill Service Manager was already the complete package,” continued Adam Haylock. “It has already offered clear benefits in ease of use, functionality and cost, with more to come. We are hoping to make greater use of the collaborative features of the underlying Hornbill platform and open up use to end-user customers as well as the service team.”