Building a strong IT foundation for the RNIB with ITSM and ITOM

With over 150 years of history, the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), dedicates its operations to providing support and raising awareness for Britons with sight impairments. It is one of the UK’s leading sight loss charities and the largest community of blind and partially sighted people.

The RNIB is always looking for ways to optimise the way their 1300+ staff members work to provide advice and support to over 2 million people every year. As is the case with many evolving institutions, the charity was working with a legacy IT system that was out of date, disjointed and reliant on manual spreadsheets. As part of an organisational review, it became a top priority for RNIB leadership to embark on a digital transformation initiative to make work more efficient for the organisation’s staff.

As a charity organisation, it was imperative for RNIB to find a product that would allow them to scale and provide short- and long-term value that clearly justifies the investment. In ServiceNow, they found that tool. FlyForm joined RNIB as the implementation partner on their digital transformation journey.

For an organisation of RNIB’s size, with multi-site national operations, a digital transformation project can be complex. RNIB’s legacy network environment was elaborate - with 6 separate domains across more than 20 sites. Additionally, working from home due to COVID-19 added the challenge of populating the CMDB from remote end-user devices. Adding to this, RNIB and FlyForm only had 7 weeks to deliver.

RNIB implemented 6 MID servers and put in place a Microsoft InTune integration to aid the Discovery of all end-user devices whilst the team continued working remotely. Thanks to this work, the full database for the CMDB was built, which acted as the backbone for the ITSM implementation. Within 3 weeks RNIB went live on time and on budget.

Getting familiar with a new tool while working remotely can be challenging. After go-live, FlyForm operated drop-in virtual sessions for RNIB staff. These sessions were helpful in giving the wider RNIB team a chance to ask questions, see live demos and ensure high adoption rates.

After go-live, RNIB transitioned its support function to the Managed Service team at FlyForm to ensure continued support and adherence to SLAs for staff requests.

FlyForm’s implementation with RNIB was delivered on time and on budget, including the following changes:

ITSM:

• Agent Workspace
• Service Portal
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Incident Management

ITOM:

• Discovery
• CMDB

Integration:

• Microsoft InTune

Services:

• Managed service and remote support

• The RNIB team has a solution that enables them to progress relevant incidents through to problems and changes seamlessly, aligning to ITIL best practices
• Using Agent Workspace, the service desk is now able to work on multiple tickets at the same time using a modern user interface, improving response time.
• Service Portal allows end-users to raise requests and incidents, moving away from generic mailboxes that are time-consuming to manage.
• The CMDB is automatically populated and maintained, giving a steady flow of real-time insights and freeing up staff time for more valuable work.
• Discovery maps out dependencies automatically, helping RNIB's Infrastructure team to understand the impact of configuration changes upstream and downstream.