Centralized it service management enhances student experience and promotes it to strategic service provider
When the centralized IT team at the University of Surrey (UoS) began unravelling issues facing its own customer helpdesk in 2014, it was unaware that its resultant success would become the reference cornerstone into a journey of customer focused service delivery across multiple UoS departments.
Ivanti service management solution implemented by CTMS
“CTMS’s hands-on approach and validation of our own internal testing meant that we could achieve a high degree of self-sufficiency from day one. In that regard, we were thrilled at the quality of their consultation, training, empowerment advice, and co-design.”
Deputy IT Director, Centralized Services UoS
Benefits
- Service management tool with reporting and ITIL processes to enhance the student experience and enhance service levels, especially during enrollment months
- Dashboards and analytics to measure performance and identify areas for ongoing improvement
- Easy-to-use workflows and out-of-the-box, ITIL-based processes and change management make it easy for IT to be self-sufficient in adding new capabilities
- More than a six-fold improvement in response times for service requests
- Internal service providers of ITIL excellence with similar departmental rollouts at the university
- Automated many previously manual processes, freeing up IT time and resources for more critical initiatives
“Fully managed, highly available, digitally enabled experience”
Based in Guildford, England, the university specializes in science, engineering, medicine, arts, social sciences and business disciplines to over 14,500 students and staff. The school’s centralized IT department strives to offer users a fully managed, highly available, digitally enabled experience.
The need for a firm ITSM foundation
As with all Higher Education (HE) institutions, problems peaked at the beginning of each academic year with a third of the UoS user base in transition. With each intake of new students came a three-fold increase in helpdesk requests, with 8,000 inbound queries arriving in six weeks—70% of which came into the helpdesk mailbox. A frantic race ensued to clear the backlog. Without tracking in place, different analysts would try to resolve the same query and frustrated users would log multiple status requests. Faced with such volumes of IT requests, IT recognized that in order to establish response and resolution targets, it needed to invest in a new platform.
Browning-Page noted, “If you want to improve customer-service performance, you need to deploy a decent service management tool. This becomes the lifeblood for improving service delivery and empowers further advances using detailed analytics to highlight where challenges need addressing.”
The Solution: Ivanti Service Manager
Enter CTMS, specialist advisors who the university had used previously for a laptop-discovery project delivered using Ivanti. The university considered CTMS as one potential supplier to provide an affordable replacement for the existing UoS service desk system. A pre-requisite was that the service management solution be largely out-of-the-box, with a minimal consultancy overhead required for easy deployment and ongoing change. Another pre-requisite was that it be delivered prior to the start of the next academic intake.
Essential features included UoS-customizable User Interfaces, Self Service, and Service Catalog options. In response, CTMS white-boarded the entire environment, validating likely UoS scenarios with detailed demos of the Ivanti helpdesk, self-service, service request, and change management modules. With the demos and plan from CTMS, combined with Browning-Page’s familiarity with previous versions of Ivanti’s Service Manager ITSM solution, the university selected Ivanti.