Waltham Forest Council is developing its use of Hornbill's Supportworks service management software to achieve ISO 20000 standard for measurable excellence in IT services. The IT team is focusing on maximising the use of Supportworks as it improves working processes for Incident, Change and Problem management and adopts ITIL best practice.

The ISO 20000 project, termed Forest IT (FIT) for the Future, is a vision that the IT department holds, encompassing a centralisation and upgrade of all IT infrastructure, working with strategic IT partners including Dell, BT, Fox and Hornbill and an alignment with the external Council-wide Comprehensive Performance Assessment. Part of the change programme also includes adoption of ITIL best practice.

"We are confident that we will be able to meet the ISO 20000 challenge. With a multi-sourced IT environment we obviously retain some functions in-house, which by nature are leaner and so performance management is vital. Supportworks is an excellent tool to enable us to manage our service delivery and we are seeking to gain benefits from this toolset that have not previously been realised," said Fay Heatley, ICT Unit Operations Manager at Waltham Forest Council.
"Supportworks is playing a critical role in this project – it will carry us through the next year and beyond as we focus on developing the existing framework and review our working practices to sustain our move to ITIL. As a strategic partner Hornbill is supporting us through this transition."

The IT department is a long-standing user of Supportworks – 40 staff in its call centre and 40 additional IT departmental staff currently use the system to provide support to over 4000 internal customers, managing more than 3200 recorded IT assets.

The team has already introduced training workshops to present the ITIL concept, prior to launching its first ITIL process for Incident management. Additional screens have been developed within Supportworks to support the new ITIL workflow processes, designed around new call classifications and prioritisations.

Gerry Sweeney, CEO of Hornbill Systems commented, "A key part of the route to meeting ISO 20000 is adopting ITIL best practice. Adopting ITIL enables teams to proactively plan and manage the IT environment, rather than rely on reactive 'firefighting' and extending adoption to the ISO 20000 standard provides an auditable measure of service delivery and improvement. Supportworks has been designed with built-in workflows that support existing business practices, while enabling new ones to be easily introduced. For organisations like Waltham Forest it provides the ideal environment and foundation for the long term adoption of ITIL and achievement of the ISO 20000 standard."

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NOTES TO EDITORS
About Waltham Forest Council
Over 225,000 people live in Waltham Forest. It is one of the most diverse boroughs in London, with a track record of people from all walks of life and different backgrounds living together.

The Council provides a range of services to the public include environmental health, recycling, street cleansing, Council Tax and Business rates collection, benefits, planning and building control, community safety and refuse collection. The services are supported by internal functions including audit, communications, finance, IT and personnel in the Chief Executive’s and Corporate Services departments.
For more information http://www.walthamforest.gov.uk