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Remedy

“With Remedy,we’re able to serve more people,provide better service,and still be accountablewithout increasing our staff.” ---Lori Sorenson, Deputy Director of Administration, Illinois Century Network

“With Remedy,we’re able to serve more people,provide better service,and still be accountable without increasing our staff.”

–Lori Sorenson, Deputy Director of Administration

In 2001, the State of Illinois tied for first place in the Digital States Survey, an award that recognizes excellence in government technology initiatives.A major contributing factor in garnering this prestigious award was the Illinois Century Network (ICN),a world-class IP network established by the state legislature in 1999 to “deliver state-of-the-art access to education, training, and electronic information.”

ICN provides high-speed access to data, video, and audio communication to 5,700 educational, governmental, research, and non-profit entities in Illinois. With two million end users, ICN is the largest network of its kind anywhere in the world. Further, the agency is saving the State of Illinois between $12 million and $15 million a year by offering the lowest possible cost for constituents to receive bandwidth to both the commercial Internet and to each other. ICN is committed to providing the best possible service to constituents and is leveraging Remedy applications to help keep costs down while also providing superior support.

Preparing for Rapid Growth

ICN’s previous homegrown problem management application was limited in functionality and did not support sophisticated workflows and business processes. Order tracking was handled by a different group using different software and different process. Not only that, but support personnel in the nine regional technology centers (RTCs) tracked their activities using spreadsheets and databases. ICN recognized that they needed a consolidated approach to handling constituent requests and complying with governmental reporting mandates.

With a growth rate of six to eight percent each month, the agency also realized that it needed a more formal, sophisticated approach to servicing constituents and reporting on its activities and performance.“Our key requirements included fast performance for our remote users, the ability to interface with other systems, easy migration of our existing data into the new system and reporting capabilities,” recalls Lori Sorenson, deputy director for administration.Column Technologies, a Remedy Systems Integrator, proposed a solution that leveraged the out-of-the-box functionality of Remedy Customer Support and Remedy Asset Management, and the flexibility of Remedy’s Action Request System® (AR System®).

Keeping Constituents Happy

Today, virtually every ICN staff member in the central office and in the nine RTCs use the Remedy solution to track constituent contact information for communications, process and track orders for new services, track constituent hardware data for troubleshooting and technical support, and feed information to the billing system.

Remedy Customer Support handles provisioning, phone support, incident management, requests, and complaints.All constituent data now resides in a single system, making it readily available to everyone who needs it.“With Remedy,we’re able to serve more people, provide better service, and still be accountable without increasing our staff,” reports Sorenson.“Our constituents are very happy with the service we provide.”

Business Service Management through Circuit Tracking

Using Remedy Asset Management, ICN can immediately determine which constituents are affected by a circuit outage, as well as which services are being provided to those constituents.The system shows the inter-relationships between circuits, including whether or not a circuit is part of a distribution router, which would indicate a larger issue. Sorenson explains,“A circuit can serve 28 or more different constituents. If that circuit goes down, Remedy Asset Management enables us to know who is impacted. The system shows us, for example, that the circuit is being fed by a certain piece of hardware, which is being fed by this circuit, and so on. If one link goes down,we can see everybody who is affected by the disruption, so we can immediately notify the constituents and tell them what’s happening. This also enables us to quickly take corrective action.” Rachelle Caldwell, ICN Systems Analyst, adds,“We usually notify the constituents before they even know that the service is down.”

Reporting Enables Accountability and Performance Measurement

The State of Illinois pays for the baseline ICN services, ensuring that most K-12 schools and libraries have high-speed Internet access at no cost.Additionally,ICN participates in the federal government’s eRate program, which reimburses certain schools and libraries for telecommunications expenses based on financial need.

Because government funding is involved, and because constituents must pay for any services beyond the baseline level, ICN must carefully track usage and demonstrate that the amount it charges for services are in line with what other providers would charge. The agency must, for example, report on how many constituents it serves, the percentage of resources each one uses,how much bandwidth is provided, and how much it costs ICN to provide that bandwidth on a per-megabyte basis.

With the Remedy solution, ICN can easily generate these reports in a variety of formats. In addition,when constituents exceed baseline usage levels, the solution passes the appropriate data to ICN’s MAS 90 application for billing purposes. Consequently, the agency can ensure that it receives payment for all the services it delivers.

ICN managers also use Remedy’s reporting capabilities to monitor staff workloads, measure performance, and spot trends in hardware problems. Sorenson says,“We look at response time provided to constituents, how promptly we turn around quotes, and how quickly we’re closing trouble tickets.We also look for trends– for example, if a certain type of hardware seems to be experiencing multiple problems or the same kind of problem over and over. This is a red flag, and we can be proactive and come up with a long term solution to the problem.”

Depreciating Inventory

ICN is required by state law to provide detailed reports on depreciation expenses for millions of dollars worth of inventory. In the past, the fiscal staff spent months manually generating these reports using spreadsheet software. Now, Caldwell is developing a depreciation expense application on AR System to automate the process.The application will pull inventory records based on specific criteria, calculate depreciation expenses for each item, and update the inventory application with the new depreciation information. “Now, instead of spending months calculating depreciation expenses, the financial people will be able to select the fiscal year and period, and then just click a button,”Caldwell notes.

Exceeding Expectations

According to Sorenson, both the Remedy solution and the support from Column Technologies have far exceeded ICN’s expectations.“The talented staff at Column put in a tremendous amount of time and effort.They guided us down the path that offered the best solution for ICN. Our staff fully embraced the Remedy system right from the beginning, which says a lot about the solution’s ease-of-use and fast performance.And the flexibility in reporting allows us to respond quickly and efficiently to requests for information.”

Caldwell added that AR System has also exceeded expectations from a development standpoint.AR System’s flexibility has enabled her to build a variety of custom applications to support ICN’s unique operational and reporting needs.“With Remedy, when it comes to adding features that streamline our business, we’re limited only by our own imagination and skill.”

Future Plans

The next major effort will be the creation of an application to track and report on blocks of IP addresses.The application will help in controlling spam, monitoring potential abuse, and tracking IP address utilization to identify when more addresses are needed.Moving forward, ICN will continue to look for new ways to leverage its investment in Remedy applications so the agency can continue to drive efficiency and contain costs while providing superior service to its expanding user community.