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Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE)

Transforming legacy systems into a unified ServiceNow platform to streamline operations, enhance security, and deliver lasting value for the Illinois State Board of Education.

End-users secured with MFA via ServiceNow
Assets normalized into an industry-standard CMDB
Full deployment

Opportunity

The Illinois State Board of Education, (ISBE), which serves over 1.9 million students across nearly 4,000 schools, faced two critical modernization challenges: fragmented asset management and legacy identity management systems. Multiple disparate databases, including Ivanti & Workspace One, as well as manual processes made asset tracking inefficient. This required significant manual effort and constant reporting to keep everything aligned. In addition, the current solution lacked multi-factor authentication (MFA) for external users and single sign-on (SSO) for employees, this meant increased security risks and workload for the service desk.

ISBE needed a unified platform to consolidate and integrate systems, streamline operations, and enhance security.

Solution

RL Canning led a collaborative, phased deployment of ServiceNow that tackled ISBE’s most pressing challenges head-on without disrupting critical operations. The goal: deliver high-impact results quickly while laying the groundwork for long-term scalability and governance.

  • Asset Management Transformation: One platform, zero redundancies. Consolidated four disparate systems into a single ServiceNow platform, creating a unified CMDB and eliminating redundant tools.
  • Identity Management Modernization: Stronger security for 750,000 users. Deployed MFA for nearly 750,000 users and enabled SSO for employees, improving security and user experience.
  • Strategic Consulting: Seamless collaboration. Took the time to understand existing tools, processes and datasets, to advise on how best to incorporate with ServiceNow using out of the box capabilities and ITIL best practices. Sunsetting many legacy methods and data points no longer needed within a modern platform.
  • Project Governance: Transparency at every step. Delivered a comprehensive project plan with weekly stakeholder calls, ensuring transparency and timely decision-making.
  • End-to-End Accountability: From vision to sustainability. RL Canning led pre-sales, deployment, and long-term support, ensuring sustainability and minimizing future technical debt.

Results

In just four months, ISBE achieved a modern, secure, and scalable platform that supports both current operations and future growth.

  • Rapid Deployment: Fully operational on ServiceNow within four months using a train-the-trainer approach.
  • Operational Efficiency: Legacy platforms were sunset, reducing costs and complexity.
  • Security & Compliance: MFA and SSO improved access control and reduced fraudulent submissions.
  • Data Normalization: Over 5,000 assets were mapped into a structured CMDB using out-of-the-box functionality.
  • Future-Ready Foundation: ISBE now operates on a streamlined, scalable platform aligned with modern IT best practices and ready for additional integration and consolidation.