Success Story Interview: Interview with an ITSM/ITIL Practitioner Based in Singapore

Greg Singleton (GS), Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Provance conducted the interview with Mr Umar Chandran (UC), an ITSM/ITIL practitioner based in Singapore, on his recent personal experience in deploying Provance ITSM at the enterprise level for a Singapore Government Agency. The Agency cannot be named.

GS: Can you tell me about the service management environment in which IT services were being conducted when you came on the scene?

UC: The legacy ITSM solution was set up by developers who were proficient in coding, but unfamiliar with the concepts of service management. The solution could no longer support the evolving nature of the business. A replacement solution was attempted, but it was unable to meet our needs.

So, the first order of business was to evaluate and find a new ITSM solution that was modern, yet flexible, with ITSM best practices that the support team could rely on to become a well-run IT service operation. It also needed to support our investments in Microsoft technologies. Provance ITSM was chosen.

GS: What were some of the challenges of the organization that the new ITSM solution needed to meet?

UC: One of the biggest challenges with the work environment is the service team is required to respond quickly to organization and employee requests. The solution needs to be very flexible and easily configurable. This is what we liked about Provance ITSM on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. As practitioner of ITIL®, I also knew how important ITIL is to a properly functioning IT division. Provance ITSM being PinkVerified was also a bonus. Since Provance ITSM had an ITIL approved backbone, it would allow our team to easily embrace ITSM best practices.

GS: Why did you need a modern, yet on-premise solution?

UC: Due to the nature of the organization, the solution had to be on-premise. But we also wanted to take advantage of modern Cloud technologies without actually being in the public Cloud. Provance ITSM could be deployed either in the Cloud or on-premise, so again, it worked for us for this matter.

GS: Any other reasons you chose Provance ITSM?

UC: The organization had already made investments in Microsoft technologies and skill sets. The capability of Provance ITSM to integrate with Microsoft technologies such as Outlook, Microsoft Office, SQL Server Datacentre, System Center, Active Directory and so on, was definitely an asset for the organization as it allowed the organization to save money by maximizing our existing investments, and of course, it would be much easier to get widespread adoption if we used integrated tools people were already familiar with such as Outlook and Microsoft Office 365.

I saw the potential of Provance ITSM to go beyond IT, and I also liked that Provance ITSM came with standard modules and functionality that already addressed the organization’s base operational requirements, including the ITIL processes. Provance also had a web-enabled self-service portal which was configurable and integrated to a fully ITIL-certified enterprise backend.

It also helped greatly that Provance’s partner, Customer Capital Consulting, is an exceptional service provider, who understood the unique internal requirements of the organization and was able to design and configure/customize Provance ITSM to meet our business and processes.  They are a capable vendor who delivered quality and timely service, and added value in areas that we least expected.

I am pleased with how the Provance ITSM implementation went during the multiple phases of the Provance ITSM roll out.

GS: Can you tell me about your experience with Customer Capital Consulting?

UC:  Prior to working with us, Customer Capital Consulting was already well entrenched in the Singapore Government and Enterprise space with multiple successful Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementations. They were very familiar on how best to get Provance to work for the organization, which had over 3000 employees and lots of legacy processes that needed to be reviewed, lots of odds and ends that needed to be worked out.

Other than ensuring quality work on the ground, they had also invested time with me and the organization to ensure the deployment was progressively and systematically rolled out so that the impact of change to the organization was minimized.

GS: What are some of the results that you had seen so far?

UC:  I saw a substantial improvement across the whole division, and two results have really stuck out for me: First, we were able to institute a change management and approval process where none had existed previously, and secondly, we have achieved a 360-degree view of our service environment. The reporting, trending and charting capabilities were such a great gift to us because it gave us greater insight and eliminated the painstaking effort of report compilation our team had to go through each day, each week and each month. Being able to use a single platform, Provance ITSM on Dynamics 365, for our IT operations has really benefited the team.

GS: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. For our audience, if you’d like more information on any of the features we spoke of today, visit our Capabilities page or watch our general overview webcast.