Ent Enhances IT Management With ServiceNow ITSM, ITOM Solution

Ent Credit Union and Veracity launched a new platform called EntAssist, built on ServiceNow using ITSM and ITOM, to allow Ent to manage its IT delivery more efficiently and accurately as it scaled to meet its goals. Despite its success in having more than 470,000 members and more than 70 locations and ATMs, Ent Credit Union has even greater aspirational goals. And to reach its goals – which includes becoming one of the largest credit unions in the country – it needed to scale. But its IT service and operations platforms were holding it back.

Ent didn’t just want another ticketing solution. The organization was looking for a comprehensive platform that could both operate at the level it strove for in the present while also continuing to scale into the future. The organization had a larger organizational maturity plan in mind and needed a platform that would allow it to grow beyond service management.

The Challenge

“That hasn’t been working for a while.” This sentiment was shared over and over by Ent employees regarding various aspects of its IT service delivery platform, which mainly served as a ticketing system. Ent was limited by the system’s outdated and rudimentary performance, limited service catalog, no clear differentiation between incidents and requests, lack of reporting capabilities, and poor user experience.

The company was interested in moving platforms to ServiceNow, and Veracity’s ability to show how its ongoing capability maturity model project would align well with ServiceNow from a best-practices standpoint helped seal the decision. With Veracity’s guidance, Ent realized that the ServiceNow platform would allow it to expand beyond just IT services, and Veracity served as an advisor to show how the platform could help them take advantage of other areas, such as facilities management (FSM), HR management (HRSD), and strategic portfolio management (SPM).

The Solution

The first step was for Veracity to create and align to Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standards and best practices, which then provided Ent with the ability to create processes and procedural documents from those standards. Next came a series of workshops to define platform requirements, setup, configuration, and deployment.

 It became clear that Ent’s solution should be a combination of ServiceNow’s IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management platforms (ITOM). And while many organizations will only implement ITSM first – as it has more visible returns on investment – Ent made the strategic decision to implement both solutions at the same time, which was a beneficial move that saved additional rework down the road.

 Veracity also leveraged service graph connectors to integrate with Microsoft SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) and Microsoft InTune, which could be delivered more quickly and required fewer licenses than other options. In all, Veracity integrated the platform with nearly 10 other solutions and pushed out approximately 90 catalog items. Along with the technical functionality, Veracity focused on an intuitive design to the portal to enhance the employee experience when navigating to make requests or track progress.

 A few of the major functional areas that were either missing or not fully utilized in Ent’s old system include:

•    ServiceNow ITSM
•    ServiceNow ITOM + Discovery
•    Mobile capabilities
•    SMS notifications
•    SCCM integration (Service graph connector)
•    Jamf integration (Service graph connector)
•    InTune integration (Service graph connector)
•    ITSM-Asset Management/Procurement 
•    Knowledge, incident management
•    Policy and procedure rewrites
•    Employee training on portal
•    IT employee trainings as fulfillers

The system’s name was both a point of pride within the organization and a way to involve employees in the project. Ent held a contest with its employees to name the new solution and landed on EntAssist. With its employees top of mind, Ent also identified a need for further employee training and preparation to be successful from day one, which led to pushing the launch date back from April to June 2023. Veracity embraced the change and the team was agile enough to adjust. Along with also supporting the change management and training efforts and leading the initial organizational change strategy, Veracity also leveraged the extra time to build in additional improvements to the platforms.

The Results

Since the launch of the platform, Ent has realized a major gain in the overall user experience. Its teams have gotten away from using email for tickets and the service portal makes the life of the employees in it every day – especially its field service teams leveraging the app – much easier.

The inclusion of ITOM drastically improved Ent’s IT infrastructure and asset visibility, providing the company with a single platform for a holistic view where they would previously have to jump to multiple platforms to see. Tying ITOM to ITSM and offering this visibility allowed Ent to improve its incident response rate, track infrastructure changes and incident avoidance, and aid in request fulfillment.

“We are now on a platform that gives us clear visibility to the data and thus the health of our ITIL processes. With this visibility, we can now focus on process improvements and clearly see the outcomes of these improvement efforts. We are very excited to be on the ServiceNow platform that Veracity helped us build out, and are looking forward to expanding its across Ent!”
Mike Ramberg Sr. Manager - ITSM

In addition, EntAssist also features a handful of improved areas from what was limited before, such as the service catalog, employee experience, incidents, and problems. ServiceNow’s Service portal also provides incident deflection, where users can use Knowledge articles and other content available to resolve issues themselves without contacting IT.

Previously, Ent didn’t have a good way to report on or quantify incidents or resolution times. With EntAssist, the company will be able to not only report on its performance and use those insights to continue improving its processes, but also monitor performance in real time, which will allow it to see potential problems as they happen and address them more quickly. And now with ITIL standards of operations, Ent has the foundation it needs to keep moving upward toward its goals.