Case Studies: Innotas Customer Success Stories

City of Tacoma: Driving Efficiency, Prioritization and IT Governance

Organization

The City of Tacoma is Washington state's third-largest city, with approximately 202,700 residents. Located at the foot of Mount Rainier and along the shores of Commencement Bay, Tacoma is recognized as a livable and progressive international city. Tacoma's IT organization employs more than 100 IT professionals with an average tenure of 25 years. The Information Technology Department provides technology services for city employees, customers, vendors and partners.

Business Challenge

Business Results through Visibility, Alignment, and Metrics

Bradd Busick, Manager, Change Management, faced significant challenges:

• Business customers were demanding more value. "We wanted visibility into projects that were in flight, delayed, canceled, or partially abandoned. IT was tracking the business on eight different spreadsheets." The business saw project delivery as an area for improvement.
• With 55 people in the division, IT needed to find a way to categorize the work in terms of enhancements, growth, maintenance, and cost. This group was challenged with communicating to senior management where people were spending their time, and how work was being prioritized and aligned with the city's overall strategic objectives.
• The mandate to optimize costs in this economy drove the requirements for governance, accountability and visibility.

Solution

Innotas On-demand IT Governance

• The City of Tacoma implemented an end-to-end solution to support the process - from initial request to project planning, estimating, scheduling to project execution - time tracking, and status reporting and dashboards. "Hardware, disaster recovery plan, and maintenance were all included in the subscription." According to Bradd, "Innotas blew away the competition."
• Innotas provides superior customer service. "Any questions were a phone call away from being answered. We have a very comfortable, trusting work relationship with our designated services manager. It isn't a typical help desk 800 number setup. The more we work with Innotas the more we improve our process and utilization of the product."
• Configuration was simple. Adoption was a tipping point at Tacoma, and, with Innotas' ease of use and packaged templates, the IT group was able to deploy, focus, and begin supporting its customers rapidly.

Results, Benefits, and Relationship

• Using Innotas, IT is better positioned than anyone else in the city - "With a click we can justify the workload at multiple levels."
• Innotas eliminated two ad hoc systems and numerous spreadsheets. "We used to manually track projects and change requests, resulting in decreased throughput and challenges with backlog management. Our five-year backlog is finally manageable."
• The business was very impressed with the Innotas dashboards, which show what IT is working on for them. "We were met with a round of applause."
• "We've become more agile and nimble. The business now knows what we are working on: growth versus sustaining versus urgent requests, and now, we can "hot swap" to better balance the IT portfolio. As a result, we have been able to service the requests with more predictability."
• IT is now able to provide KPIs to senior management and power the growth and value-add of IT.
• "We now facilitate and enable cultural change and can implement new initiatives in a streamlined manner."