The Skövde Municipality IT Department is responsible for supporting about 7,500 employees across Skövde, Hjo, and Tibro Municipalities. They needed a more user-friendly experience for end users to request services throughout their organization. Working with Cireson partner Innofactor, they customized the Cireson SCSM Self-Service Portal to create categories for more than 70 forms with role-based access and visibility. Magnus Lundgren, Objektspecialist, shared some of what they were able to accomplish with System Center, SCSM, Cireson apps, and Cireson Community solutions below.
SCSM Self-Service Portal Home Page
The layout of their Self-Service Portal is based on their in-house service catalog. From the home page, end users can quickly and easily navigate to:
- Tier 1: Self-Service Portal Offering category list
- Tier 2: Service Offerings
- Tier 3: Request Offerings
First, you select a category:
Then, drill down into the form you want:
Most of their forms also include custom code for placeholder text. Fields are auto-filled with user information from custom queries, including their department, phone number, Employee ID, and more.
Example: On-boarding Form Automation
Most of their forms are fully automated with Orchestrator – everything from application deployment to new servers, account creation, and more. The goal of their customized on-boarding form was to have one form for all new employees to use. Previously, there were nearly 10 separate forms, which meant Managers had to review 10 separate forms. After entering their Swedish ‘social security number’ and completing the form, a series of Service Requests are automatically created and distributed to the proper groups. The initial Service Request is closed and in the “Resolved” mail, you get a list of the Service Requests that have been created so you can monitor their status from within the Self-Service Portal.
Role-Based Form Access
Not every user needs access to all 70+ forms in the system. They created role-based views so that only the people related to a task have visibility into using specific forms. This makes it easier for end users to find what they’re looking for, and ensures only people relevant to a ticket receive information and updates. For example, specific people place orders and in the form, they select the employee that is to receive the computer. After the new computer form is complete, a runbook then sets that user as the affected user and at the same time adds the Service Requests on the created by users watchlist so that both the users that the order is for and the person that placed the order can keep track of the service requests.
Both the person that places the request and the affected user are notified when the service request is created and completed.
For all of the forms that are published only for specific personnel, two hidden textprompts are auto-filled with the user’s Company and Department, which helps to filter out options so they can only select user, applications, etc. that are published for those specific departments. All within a single form instead of multiple forms for the same purpose.
They’ve implemented additional functions for auto-filling text prompts after you select a user, including the phone number, office, department etc. This is done by the query API which does a SQL query for the selected user’s information. And it’s all done from the form creation with ”@ tokens” so no java script is needed for the basic stuff! The tokens are taken from the Cireson Community post ‘toolbox’, in addition to other tools they’ve created themselves.
After the new computer form is complete, a runbook then sets that user as the affected user and at the same time adds the Service Requests on the created by users watchlist so that both the user that the order is for and the person that placed the order can keep track of the Service Requests. The same automation also cleans up the description of the Service Request so that prompts that the user didn’t answer are removed.
Learn about Skövde Municipality here.
