ITSM service desk for MLOZ

MLOZ, the independent health insurance funds, group five dynamic health insurance funds. With more than two million members, this group is the third largest insurance institution in Belgium. The organization strives to be proactive and innovative in the health sector.

• Deep integration with external databases and applications
• Accurate real-time reporting
• Extended self-service desk

The challenge

A modern and integrated service desk for over 70,000 tickets/year

MLOZ have an IT service desk for submitting and logging incidents and requests. This service desk is outdated and no longer compatible with modern environments. Support has been discontinued and the portal cannot be upgraded to a more recent version.

In addition, integration of certain data is impossible: the service desk can only generate limited reports and SLAs and certain processes can't be configured correctly.

MLOZ were very clear: they didn’t want this anymore! What they wanted was a Jira Service Management that seamlessly matched their current Jira environment. This Jira Service Management had to be able to configure SLAs in a flexible way, follow up in real-time and generate accurate reports. The service desk also needed to integrate seamlessly with their existing Service Management Reporting Tool and a new self-service portal.

Our solution

Application for Support & Knowledge (ASK) servicedesk

MLOZ already opted for Jira Service Management by themselves, so we no longer had to convince them of the power of this ITSM software. But the correct implementation and the required close integration with other tools were still very important.

User-friendly self-service desk with tight integrations

The ASK application has its own self-service portal with an integrated knowledge base based on Confluence. This allows users to quickly find solutions to problems themselves and reduces the pressure on the teams that work on the service desk.

Creating a ticket is also easier thanks to a clear, user-friendly and intuitive layout of the portal.

The user-friendliness for the service desk agents has also been increased. ASK is integrated with MLOZ's Configuration Management Database (CMDB), allowing agents to immediately see in an ASK ticket which software is on the laptop. Because they no longer have to look up configurations in the database themselves they save a lot of time. Thanks to Skype integration, an agent can also quickly call an end user, in order to achieve a faster ticket solution.

Finally, there is a close integration with the Jira instance of the development team. Because ASK can easily 'talk' with this instance, it is easy to link tickets and issues and let the teams work together. This integration alone saves MLOZ 12 man days per year!

Real-time, accurate reporting

SLAs and reporting are important for ITSM teams. Thanks to the implementation of an EazyBI plugin, MLOZ can now generate very accurate reports from complex Jira data in real-time. These reports are also generated completely automatically, without the need to adjust anything manually.

The SLAs within ASK can also be configured very flexibly. They can be adjusted per team and per type of incident.

For example, a first-line team has a tighter timing than a second-line team, whose problems are more severe and take longer to resolve, and a request for certain access is also granted faster than solving a complex software problem. The available SLA time is always visible on the issue in question.

Better performance, security, and follow-up (SMS)

Jira is based on responsive web technology, which makes MLOZ's IT service desk a lot more efficient. In addition, the service desk supports the latest versions of browsers and mobile devices, which helps with both speed and security.

There is also a higher degree of security due to the restrictions that can now be placed on tickets based on the type of user. For example, certain tickets are protected and not every user can just view everything. Besides that, a security breach can now be immediately reported to the IT security department, which reduces the risk of leaks to the outside world.

Finally, we provided a customized solution that can send and receive SMS notifications if there is an escalation, directly from the service desk. This way MLOZ can keep response times to a minimum.