Education through innovation
Western Governors University offers competency-based higher education, on the student's schedule, entirely online. At its inception 25 years ago, WGU leveraged the burgeoning internet to reinvent education for modern needs.
When WGU began its quest in 1997, online learning tools were essentially non-existent, so WGU had to create home-grown tools. As both grew more popular and complicated, new solutions were required to meet demands and steady their foundations for the future.
WGU now operates in multiple regional hubs with three main corporate offices in the United States. They have 150,000 full-time students in all 50 states and in military stations overseas. For the last 12 years, WGU has utilised the ServiceNow platform.
Bridge the gap with ServiceNow
WGU has tried and discarded several ITSM products over the years, leaving ServiceNow as the only solution capable of keeping up with WGU's growing demands. ITSM has decreased support resolution times without requiring a focus on additional personnel requirements.
With Knowledge Management WGU has provided content for multiple departments across 70+ Knowledge Bases. There are over 140 custom applications, 334 Service Catalogue items, over 5,000 Knowledge articles and integrations with Oracle, Salesforce, SailPoint, Active Directory, Atlassian and more.
"We use data that comes through our tickets for incidents, major incidents, problem resolution and root cause analysis to drive down our outage time", says Brian Jolley, Director of Service Management.
Adds Jolley, "Having multiple channels flow through to, for example, the service desk has been invaluable, giving them a way to connect tickets to knowledge articles and address whatever the incoming issue is about. ServiceNow is a pivotal element of our rapidly growing maturity as an enterprise".
"The Knowledge Management and Employee Center processes in ServiceNow have improved how WGU operates tremendously. They give users the assurance that information is kept up to date, contributors the tools to manage their information effectively and managers to track progress on key articles", says Adam Sawyer, Manager, Training and Technology Enablement. "A solid Knowledge Management process can be a selling point for any organisation and ServiceNow has enabled those positive conversations and interactions at WGU".
A strong foundation for a stronger future
With ITSM proven, Performance Analytics blossoming and Vulnerability Response collating and correcting, the foundation was set to reliably bring everything together into a database to manage it all.
"Many of our business areas evolved independently. One of the challenges is understanding where all our data is. Groups such as legal and procurement, support desk, product development and engineering all might have their own independent list of products and vendors and may make decisions to invest in technology without good coordination", says Jolley.
The CMDB and Discovery have been put into place. Vulnerability Response has provided a layer of reassurances and confidence with CI health. With application and services mapping, the future will continue to leverage a maturing CMDB linked with Incident, Change and Problem Management.
With this comes clarity of risk over time, security or financial and a transparency to the organisation as to what is working and what is not. ITOM Visibility creates a map, visual and meaningful, which can drive ongoing decision making that is justified. Infrastructure and logical architecture are delivered in a clear and comprehensible manner, no matter the organisation's audience.
"In a way, it seemed like we had too much information and that we had nothing to organise it all or know how much was invalid and how much pure", says Caleb Felton, Platform Architect. "ITOM Visibility is aptly named. It has brought everything into focus".
A focus on people
WGU added HR Service Delivery to include HR related content to Employee Center. "HRSD brings into the fold our ability to handle tickets. Managing knowledge in more of an ITIL compliant way is revolutionary", says Jolley.
"For example, there wasn't a centralised location where an employee could go find benefits information", says Aaron Day, Supervisor of the ServiceNow Engineering Team. "CMDB, and especially HRSD, are efforts to get out of the wild, wild west and have sources of information available to everybody. It helps get away from tribal knowledge and offer more transparency".
Tina Watson, Senior Software Engineering Manager adds, "One of the managers that works with us quite a bit said that when she first joined the WGU HR organisation, part of her job was using five spreadsheets to reconcile new hires. She had to regularly go in and manually combine data from the five spreadsheets".
"HRSD has transformed how our P&T (People & Talent) teams collaborate. Moving away from individual emails, HRSD ensures transparency across all tasks, enhancing both team synergy and the overall employee experience. Moreover, it offers a clear view into the extensive operations of our P&T/HR groups, making it an essential cornerstone for our vision of a top-tier HR shared services function", says Paul Droubay, VP Talent Rewards.
Enhancing service delivery
Deploying Demand, PPM, SPM and DPM is underway. Strategic Portfolio Management is to be used for all capital investments.
"WGU has just rolled out demand management and project management to manage IT projects and the portfolio for the university", says Watson. "From what I've seen, the processes that we have to build our students' academic programmes and design courses are far more mature than anything I've seen in any IT organisation in 30 years".
Watson continues, "Those teams will be using SPM to manage those programmes, the course development and the programme development. "Our academic organisation is fully on board. The VP that has been the champion for this is probably the biggest fan of ServiceNow".
"We obsess at WGU over continuously improving student experiences and outcomes. Strategic portfolio management in ServiceNow is a major part of how we maintain alignment across our entire university and make sure we are working on the most important initiatives that will improve the lives of students. We don't have to reconcile different reports from different organisations and tools to see how we are performing. With ServiceNow, we have an enterprise-class system that speeds up informed decision making and execution", says Adam Davis, VP of Operations.
Continuous evolution
Western Governors University relies on innovation and as such it has needed to create most of what it needed in-house. Over time, this can have the side-effect of having so many toolboxes that no one knows what all is in them. ServiceNow is the multi-tool, evolving as quickly as WGU is, that is being used to keep the road ahead clear.
WGU has been invited to join the ServiceNow Product Advisory Council for Strategic Portfolio Management. The university just completed its Vendor Risk Management deployment and implementing Policy and Compliance is next.
"I have seen many new team members concerned about using ServiceNow in their respective processes, though within a month or two they tend to see the value it provides. Streamlined workflows, defined audit trails and quick reporting capabilities make stakeholder conversations significantly easier and improves our response to incoming questions or problems", says Sawyer. "The growth of ServiceNow at WGU and its integration in almost every part of the staff/student lifecycle is proof that its processes are effective and provide clear value to end users".
About Western Governors University
Western Governors University is an online institution of higher learning dedicated to making higher education accessible for as many people as possible. With affordable tuition and flexible programmes, WGU enables students to study when, where and how they like.