Arts Council gets tech troubleshooting boost

The Arts Council England has enlisted an IT service management system from Sunrise Software to help keep its tech troubleshooting running smoothly.

The organisation adopted the platform last year some months before a reorganisation that saw the Arts Council England IT centralised.

With the reorganisation giving the Council an opportunity to review and standardise the way IT was approached, the organisation decided to move towards using Itil.

Owen Powell, IT director at the Arts Council England, told silicon.com that Itil is vital for providing a consistent IT service.

"In the past, IT had been provided by people based out in regions… some of them were good, some of them weren't so good. What we found was, when we did surveys, we got a huge disparity in the way the quality of the IT service was perceived. What we were aiming to do was to have a consistently good service - Itil procedures meant that all calls will be handled same way so we could set a clear expectation to staff of what would happen.

"When we centralised, there was some anxiety from some of the regions that they were losing their local IT support - we had to sell them to them this industry standard way of doing things, this consistency and clear procedures for logging calls and escalating them and all those sort of things," he said.

With the need for an Itil-ready system to replace the clunky, expensive IT service management platform the Arts Council England used previously, the organisation set about finding a replacement.

Being a public sector body, the Council was looking for a cost-effective system, according to Powell, as well as one that could be flexible.

"Every time we made a change, we wanted to make it ourselves, rather than bringing in expensive consultants to do it for us," he said.

The Council decided that Sunrise's Sostenuto platform hit the mark.

"It worked really well. We had a brand new team recruited for the new service desk, it was a relaunch and a new way of doing things. It was quite a lot of change and it could have gone wrong," he said. "But actually the team took to the [Sunrise] product very well, so obviously it was quite easy to use and quite intuitive insofar as any of these systems are. The calls got logged and dealt with, and a recent survey that we've just done has been very positive about new IT service," Powell said.

The deployment has also meant quicker turnaround times in fixing service desk issues and less time spent fixing problems with the incident management platform itself.

"The team are more knowledgeable but it's good they're not having to spend too much time figuring how the system works and the software works and getting on with fixing calls," he said.

Currently, the Council chiefly uses Sunrise's incident management functionality but may add change management functionality and other Itil modules in the future.