Community Integrated Care sees benefits of Power BI reporting

Power BI Reporting integration adds vital visibility to COVID driven change with Sunrise ITSM.

Community Integrated Care (CIC) is a national social care charity which provides care and support to thousands of people with a diverse range of needs across England and Scotland. With over 5,500 staff of whom 4,500 are frontline workers in 450 locations, technology support requirements during the unforeseen COVID crisis put massive pressure on IT.

ITSM Reporting benefits from Power BI integration

Paul Thompson is CIC’s Head of Information Technology and described how 2020 pushed technology to the forefront in enabling the care organisation’s COVID response.
With care homes in total lockdown, unforeseen challenges emerged in terms of not only hardware but also infrastructure support requirements – 16 x more bandwidth was provisioned and fibre broadband installed to 200 more locations than previously planned. Supporting non-technical users such as care workers – some older workers in their 60s – to use and facilitate video conferencing, such as Teams was a new challenge for the IT Helpdesk team, raising call request numbers in the ITSM software, which even 6 months later remain at 600 live at a time.

As Paul says: “We implemented two years’ worth of changes in 6 months! We’re in a position now to have learned from the first wave and to plan for the future with laptop upgrades, for example. It was a good perspective for IT to have people ‘pull’ technology through requests though, rather than us have to ‘push’ it. The organisation even got creative; the Leeds Rhinos Super League team ran some online fitness sessions – people were using technology like you’d never have thought, and it all went through the helpdesk.”

Paul runs a ‘slim’ support operation, with 5 agents in first line support and 2 more on second / third line. COVID highlighted a skills gap in both users & the support desk to which Paul had to respond. This placed all the more value on reporting based on Service desk data – CIC’s integration of Sunrise with Power BI* provided both detailed IT team management and Departmental and Board level views on IT performance.

Regarding the IT ‘Estate’, the Power BI dashboard provides Paul and the HelpDesk Manager with both overview dashboards on current and previous performance metrics, such as average time for resolution vs SLA, and the ability to drill down to each support team member, comparing an individual’s performance with the team overall. A mobile view of Power BI is available too, so that when Paul is on the move, he can check a call’s status and his team’s response in seconds, should he need to update a user.

Trends are easily spotted and highlighted, while Sunrise customer survey responses can be viewed recently and over time. With CIC’s IT contracts also managed in Sunrise, Paul can keep a handle on expiring and renewal requirements and their associated costs via Power BI.

At a broader level, non-IT departmental level data can be viewed, collated and shared as necessary, such as with Finance. Paul reports to the CFO and charts provided to the Board highlight visually the main issues to prioritise for resourcing and training investment. Directors of the six geographical regions also receive an easily consumable IT perspective of their responsibilities via Power BI.

As Paul summarises, “Covid-19 forced a huge step-change with pressure growing for IT to deliver almost overnight, and users’ expectations of technology increasing enormously. The need to manage IT services centrally was demonstrated more than ever and so the business’s requirement for Sunrise data and the insight provided by Power BI has proven of immense value.”

What inspiring work under pressure from the Community Integrated Care team – we’re delighted that Sunrise ITSM has been able to support you during the pandemic and when planning for the future.
Find out more about Integration of Power BI with Sunrise ITSM.