Spectrum Health transforms the IT and HR support experience

Championing healthcare in Michigan
Spectrum Health delivers more than $550 million in community benefits annually to the people of Michigan through its extensive health services, health education and research programs, investments in infrastructure, innovation, and community partnerships, and its care for vulnerable members of society.

Maximizing value and impact
Spectrum Health wanted to enable fast and easy access to IT and HR services and support, empowering its healthcare professionals to spend more time with patients. “But back in 2018, we had more than 27 individual systems that made up our enterprise resource planning ecosystem,” explains Tania Bethea, Senior Director of ERP and Enterprise Business Systems. “Some of these had been in place for more than 20 years. We had multiple systems in our service management space too and in both areas, systems were stitched together, causing a brittle, disjointed, and inefficient experience.” Spectrum Health’s Vice President of Total Rewards, Joel Gontjes, reports similar difficulties for employees seeking HR service or support.

“In the past, there were all sorts of ways in which team members could contact HR. Multiple phone numbers, email boxes, and outdated material on old web pages led to confusion, with people being passed around from one person to another, getting conflicting answers, and answer shopping depending on the response.”

As firm believers in the power of strategic platforms, Spectrum Health decided to replace multiple, disconnected legacy technologies with a single, consolidated ERP platform – Workday – integrated with ServiceNow’s IT and HR Service Management systems. For maximum value and impact, Spectrum Health brought these interrelated projects together into one transformational program to unlock new, more efficient, and productive ways of working, greatly enhancing the employee experience across IT and HR services and support.

Maximizing time with patients
Spectrum Health wanted to enable fast and easy access to IT and HR services and support, empowering its healthcare professionals to spend more time with patients. It decided to replace multiple, disconnected legacy technologies with a single, consolidated ERP platform—Workday—integrated with ServiceNow’s IT and HR Service Management systems.

For maximum value and impact, Spectrum Health brought these interrelated projects together into one transformational program, to unlock new, more efficient, and productive ways of working, greatly enhancing the employee experience across IT and HR services and support.

Taking away the pain
“We established some guiding principles at the outset of the program,” explains Director of Enterprise Service Delivery, Burton Smith. “Like for like was not an option, we wanted to transform, not migrate. A key motivator was that we wanted to take away the pain that so many of our people – from nursing teams to procurement colleagues – were experiencing trying to use our legacy systems.

“The adage ‘we’ve always done it this way’ was not acceptable, and we applied the 20:80 rule, where 80% of the solution had to be out-of-the-box, with just 20% configuration. Most importantly, we put people, and the team member experience, at the heart of this transformation, also keeping in mind our long-term goals.”

Guided by a clear strategy, precise program principles, and forensic project and change management planning, Spectrum Health deployed new, out-of-the-box ServiceNow technologies in a phased program. Phase one provided the foundations, with a new IT service management platform and portal, alongside software asset management, governance, risk, and compliance solutions. “We focused on the basics,” explains Burton Smith. “The most fundamental element of any ServiceNow implementation is an understanding of the Common Services Data Model (CSDM) and Configuration Management Database (CMDB). All subsequent business capabilities depend on getting this right.”

On-time, on budget
With incident, change, knowledge, and configuration management added, all phase one elements were delivered on time and on budget, despite the complexities of the COVID-19 pandemic. This enabled Spectrum Health to move confidently into its second phase, the implementation of ServiceNow HR Service Delivery featuring a bespoke HR service center that works for physicians, field staff, and other employees, with HR case and knowledge management, using the same enterprise-wide portal, or ‘front door’ built for information services. The deployment included unified mobile access, and multiple self-service opportunities such as Virtual Agent, all integrated with Workday. This ensured that all colleagues could get support, wherever they choose to work, day or night. This is essential in the intense, 24/7 healthcare environment where life-changing decisions are being made every minute of the day.

Next on the agenda are application portfolio management and service mapping. Burton Smith predicts that Spectrum Health will achieve its return on investment in ServiceNow ahead of its projected 6.5-year timespan.

Self-service rapidly increasing
The appetite for what ServiceNow can offer has been growing at speed and, by the summer of 2021, 31,000 Spectrum Health doctors, nurses, and support staff, or 97% of the total, were accessing IT and HR services on one, easy-to-use, fully integrated platform featuring 10,000 knowledge articles and a 70,000-item service catalog. More than half a million items had been requested from the catalog and articles had been viewed on 1.5 million occasions.

The quality and consistency of HR information and support has been transformed, with one complete ecosystem replacing multiple legacy systems, email boxes, phone numbers, and webpages, with self-service rates already at 15% and rapidly increasing. Data and analytics are producing business-critical insights and informing continual service improvements across the IT and HR landscape. “The transparency the ServiceNow platform provides is absolutely huge,” says Burton Smith. “Now everyone can see the status of requests, who is fulfilling it, and how it can be escalated. When a nurse needs some IT support, waiting on the telephone for a service desk response just won’t work. That help is now almost instantaneous. For example, a community clinic can now see precisely when equipment will be delivered, and they can rely on that information.”

“Tasks that used to take an employee several days, such as onboarding large numbers of nursing interns in the fall, can now be done in an hour or two. All of these examples go together to help our people spend more time with patients, which is what matters most. ServiceNow also removes the sense of isolation that they may have felt previously. The platform takes care of these basics; we can now focus on things that really add value and impact for the organization, like taking care of patients.” Teresa Nelson, Senior Director of HR Technology, stresses the importance of providing 24/7 solutions for colleagues, when support teams’ core hours are 8am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. “Healthcare is a round-the-clock operation, so self-service via the knowledgebase or Virtual Agent is vital.

“Now we have insight into the volume of calls by assignment groups, topics, and average time to resolution, helping us improve operations and monitor customer service. “The feedback we now receive from team members who utilize the knowledgebase is key to improving our service and the team member experience. We have insights into which articles are most utilized, which are not at all, and which need to be refined. Colleagues can rate articles and leave comments on why an article was helpful or not.”

Empowering people
Joel Gontjes stresses the importance of partnership in the delivery of a multi-faceted, transformational project. “Selecting the right partner was key to our success, and KPMG did a great job in coordinating so many complex elements and maximizing their value and impact.” In 2020 KPMG received the ServiceNow Americas Transformation Partner of the Year for its work across IT and HR. Adds Burton Smith: “I think we share some very important values and ways of working, such as the thoroughness and rigor of our approach and appreciation of where these technologies fit in the organization as a whole.

With ServiceNow, we can distribute ownership of the platform to empower people to do their jobs while effectively collaborating with the whole, making us infinitely more efficient in our ability to manage processes and products.

“In a nutshell, people wanted us to make things easier for them and to be able to take care of simple tasks when and how it suited them. That’s what ServiceNow has delivered.”

With a proven methodology for large-scale, transformational IT and HR projects, Spectrum Health has positioned itself for long-term success and growth. Concludes Tania Bethea: “Digital transformation is driven by technology but realized by people. Our change management focused on personal experience and new ways of working, while our vision, guiding principles, and governance helped us realize the value of ServiceNow and Workday. With these strategic platforms as our foundation, we are poised to deliver continued value to our organization, allowing us to care for our patients, colleagues, and communities.”