Clearer Visibility in a Healthcare Environment

Intermountain Healthcare needed to move data between instances without resorting to cloning or after-hours batch jobs. They also needed to merge ServiceNow data with that of other systems for more detailed analytics.

The Problem

Production to Sub-production: Intermountain was using nightly batch jobs to sync their data on users, groups, and roles from their production to their sub-production environment. Not only were the evening integrations load intensive; they were also not frequent enough. Developers working with CMDB data in the sub-production environments needed faster and more accurate views of Intermountain’s data. The situation called for dynamic, real-time replication.

Reporting: Intermountain works with data from a number of sources, including ServiceNow, Avaya, Microsoft Project Server, PeopleSoft, and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. Wanting the highest visibility into incidents, their initial focus was on aggregating incident data from ServiceNow and call data from Avaya, bringing this data into a local database for reporting. Understanding ServiceNow’s reporting tools, Intermountain found that they also needed to run more in-depth analytics, including reporting on hierarchies.

The Solution

Having a team of a half dozen ServiceNow developers, Intermountain considered building the integration solution. After some number-crunching that accounted for development and support, they decided to buy rather than build. Intermountain evaluated a number of alternatives, including many vendors they had met at ServiceNow’s Knowledge conference.

Ultimately, Intermountain selected Perspectium, considering it to be the most complete and reliable solution. Implementation required minimal resources. “I was actually surprised how few people we needed to put this together,” says Mike Christiansen, ServiceNow Developer and Data Analyst for Intermountain Healthcare.

The Payoff

Exchanging over 1 million records per month, Intermountain now gives its developers real-time, accurate views into its production instance so that they can operate within the sub-production environment with certainty.

Reports also became more advanced. (Example: For the top 3 configuration items that have occurred with incidents, what are the assigned groups?) Intermountain created a new catalog offering of reports and analytics, made possible because of the new integrations.

For more, see highlights from the webinar, "Integrating ServiceNow at Intermountain Healthcare."