World Vision International

About World Vision International

World Vision is a nonprofit humanitarian organization that operates globally in over 100 countries in six regions with nearly 35,000 staff and more than 112,000 volunteers. As a global Christian relief, development and advocacy organization, World Vision’s focus is on helping the most vulnerable children, in the most difficult places, overcome poverty and injustice, irrespective of religion, race, ethnicity or gender. In order to successfully reach that goal, World Vision needs to keep up with the changing times to be more relevant to their key stakeholders, staff, the communities, and donors they serve.

Committed to accelerating digital transformation, World Vision seeks opportunities to rethink operations and service delivery across four strategic domains: technology platforms, data services, digital capabilities, and operational excellence. “When we talk about IT operational excellence, it more often than not is synonymous with IT service management,” said Jerome Capili, IT director of global service management at World Vision.

Having spent his career in IT service management for global and multinational companies, Capili saw the potential impact a well-designed digital strategy could have on the organization’s stakeholders, staff, communities, and supporters. “By reimagining end-to-end operations and service delivery through digital transformation, we can enrich our users’ experiences and accelerate the promise that is always at the forefront of our minds – helping vulnerable children all over the world,” Capili said.

The team launched the Service Management Going Further initiative, starting with a full review of the existing Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) platform through a series of Journey to Value workshops managed by Micro Focus Professional Services. They used the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) – a process that helps organizations to measure, build, and optimize capabilities to improve overall performance – and the outcomes were enlightening. The platform had a Stage 2 maturity level, with a Stage 4 goal. Lacking business function capabilities, it had an IT-only focus. Processes and workflows required a high degree of customization, resulting in a complex system that slowed down implementations and was difficult to maintain and support. A fixed-user license model restricted system use and hindered global adoption.

For these reasons, World Vision chose a new solution – Micro Focus SMAX – to elevate service management with embedded operational excellence and an optimized platform that sparks user productivity. 

SMAX also streamlines service delivery and enhances the user experience. According to Capili, “SMAX delivers a full range of IT and enterprise service management capabilities, from incident management, request fulfillment, and configuration to analytics and reporting. This increases our agility and enables essential automation, self-service, and data-driven decision making. Throughout the project lifecycle, we worked closely with all stakeholders through enablement sessions. We incorporated their feedback to support new ways of working. This early involvement increased our user adoption once SMAX was introduced.”

With SMAX, World Vision can work collaboratively across the organization to provide high-quality IT and business services. The single source of truth platform increases employee engagement, advances process and workflow design, and enables integration with third-party solutions. Leveraging standard functionality substantially reduces the solution’s total cost of ownership. It makes the team more agile, enabling smaller, more frequent changes, rather than complex, large ones.

SMAX was implemented successfully – 25 percent faster than planned, without additional resources. Since its implementation, SMAX consistently delivers in three key areas:

• Enriching the user experience to build trust.
• Reimagining service management to maximize value.
• Advancing digital impact to support self-service.

According to Capili, SMAX’s success is clear. 

Service management has been streamlined in tangible ways. Nearly 60 service definitions now support automation and self-service. The fully integrated service catalogue – which includes 42 services from the old system – has grown to more than 300 new offerings. The knowledge article library has been increased by 44 percent. And by configuring more than 140 new routing rules, manual assignments are declining.

Users are also recognizing the benefits of self-service. World Vision has seen a 108 percent increase in staff using the SMAX portal, rather than email, for reporting issues. What’s more, user interactions with AI-driven SMAX chat bots are on the rise.

Thanks to SMAX, World Vision is perfectly positioned to eventually reach their Stage 4 service management target. They have stabilized the service management platform and are working towards initiating the definition of minimum viable practices. These practices, which are supported by the SMAX modules, were included in the previous implementation.