How the Hubble Space Telescope's IT team went from email to full-service support

Since the launch of Hubble in 1990, the only way for team members to get help with the telescope's operations has been to email the IT department

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for nearly 30 years, and has been instrumental in discoveries such as the age of the Universe and dark energy. And yet, for all of the remarkable things that scientists and astronomers do with Hubble, how is it supported?

Through email.

Susan Reed is the IT services support manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI), which is responsible for monitoring the health of Hubble - and, when it is launched, will also look after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Long resolution times were common, there were almost no reporting capabilities and it was difficult to alert the community to any changes, events or outages

It was the upcoming launch of the latter that prompted the organisation to adopt ServiceNow, starting with IT Service Management (ITSM) and then transitioning to Customer Service Management (CSM).

Since 1990, when Hubble was launched, the only recourse for anyone who has needed help with the telescope's operations has been to email STSI's IT department. There has been no self-help, no knowledge base and no such thing as an immediate response.

Long resolution times were common, there were almost no reporting capabilities and it was difficult to alert the scientific and astronomy community to any changes, events or outages. Despite all of that, "There was this belief that ‘If it worked for Hubble, why change?'" Reed told attendees at ServiceNow's Knowledge 19 conference this week.

STSI's scientists and engineering groups did not really trust the IT department, which was mainly viewed as being there to support back office infrastructure; building that trust was "really hard".

Non-IT departments wanted to build a service management platform without IT

Non-IT departments wanted to build a service management platform without IT and suggested various examples of "weird third-party software", which Reed argued against on the basis that many of the vendors might not exist in a year or two.

To build trust, and gain support for a new service management platform, Reed went straight to the top of the organisation to get buy-in from both the IT Division Head (CIO) and Mission Head of the JWST.

She also gathered white papers and case studies from other similar organisations, like NASA and CERN, and rebranded the ServiceNow implementation to ‘STARS' (Space Telescope Action Request System).

"I tried every single word and I could think of with astronomical associations, until I found one where I could make it work," she said.

The further down the journey we went, the more I realised, ‘We do need customer service management'

Another challenge was helping STSI to view the astronomical community as ‘customers', because the organisation provides a service, and this would aid the IT team in building the service management proposition.

However, IT faced significant pushback; the primary barrier to understanding was that astronomers and scientists do not pay STSI for using Hubble; instead, it pays them by helping to fund their work. Nevertheless, showing that the organisation delivered services helped to shift some departments' thinking; others, like HR and finance, were already operating in this way.

When STSI began the implementation ServiceNow was just launching CSM as a product, and both the integrator and ServiceNow salesperson tried to convince Reed to adopt it. In this case, she was the one who pushed back.

"I said, ‘No, I have a portal, I have a catalogue, I just need ITSM, that makes sense to me'. But the further down the journey we went, the more I realised, ‘We do need customer service management. This is so much better, it's better to have things come in at pace. I need to get data to people quicker and this is going to be the way to do it'. So, we started down this path."

One of the biggest drivers was customers demanding visibility into their submitted cases, requests and issues. There are often groups of people sharing the Telescope, and they all want to see everything submitted; that is not possible in ITSM without all of them having quite a senior level, but it is possible in CSM.

One of the biggest drivers was customers demanding visibility into their submitted cases, requests and issues

Other drivers included increasing self-service opportunities and improving staff productivity at STSI (by being able to focus requests to specific groups of people who are suited to answering those questions).

To smooth the transition, the IT team reviewed its ITSM workflows and re-engineered them from a customer experience perspective, while leaning heavily on ServiceNow's Business Management module "to manage our stories, our tasks and our deliverables".

Reed said that one of the key lessons she learned from the entire experience was that STSI should have adopted ServiceNow much sooner, and approached it from a customer experience perspective.

"We had got about 40 or 50...catalogue items that we built for IT right away. And [one day I realised], ‘Oh my God, I've set up my portal but It's not for my customer, it's for IT... It's all about IT'. It's not, it's about the customer experience. And that's what we needed to do, is change it to the customer experience."

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