NI Civil Service gets IT upgrade


6 Jun 2007

The Northern Ireland Civil Service has deployed an IT business management system from Touchpaper across its offices.

Using Touchpaper’s core ServiceDesk system, the Northern Ireland Civil Service ICT Shared Service Centre (NICS ICT SSC) plans to create a central service desk across all 11 departments of the NICS with a view to enhancing service availability, resilience and improving customer satisfaction.

The system currently supports 150 analysts and 9,000 users at five departments across the NICS: the Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP); the Office of the First and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM); the Department of the Environment (DOE); the Department of Regional Development (DRD); and the Department of Culture Arts and Leisure (DCAL).

Over the coming year, the Touchpaper system will expand to provide service delivery to all government departments, encompassing up to 500 analysts and 18,000 end-users by April 2009.

The system is ITIL verified and it’s first incarnation went live just nine weeks after the contract was signed.

“After a rigorous evaluation of the marketplace, Touchpaper was the unanimous choice,” said Paul Gillen, ITSM project manager, NICS ICT SSC. “We were particularly impressed with the way that Touchpaper demonstrated outstanding flexibility in working closely with NICS and our partners to achieve the aggressive timescales imposed on us by the conditions of an Open European Tender. We still have a lot to achieve over the next 18 months – from consolidating all 11 departments, tightly aligning our processes and infrastructure to ITIL principles and introducing specific service levels that are closely linked to the business. However, with Touchpaper we are confident that we have the right technology and business partner on our side.”

Prior to implementing Touchpaper, NICS had six separate information system units supporting 11 separate departments, each with its own service management toolset. It also had loose alignment to ITIL and immature service level management. From now on NICS will be closely aligned to ITIL principles, have service level agreements based on services supporting business processes instead of infrastructure components and the service desk will be a one-stop shop for IT troubleshooting.

By Niall Byrne