Interview with Mark Flexman from Bournemouth University

[SimonMorris]

One of the most enjoyable experiences since joining ServiceNow has been interacting with the community of customers, partners and colleagues.

There really is a strong sense of following on both this website, as well as on Twitter and other social platforms.

On Twitter I came into contact with Mark Flexman (@flexy1970). Mark has led a ServiceNow deployment for Bournemouth University, on the English south coast, and has been sharing his experiences via his Twitter stream along the way. With his integrator, Arlen Vartazarian from Focus Group there has definitely been a journey from the start of his project to his Go Live date in December.

@flexy1970: The BU IT team with @Focusge just after a very smooth and successful @servicenow go live this morning.

Mark was good enough to answer a few questions:

Me: So… introduce yourself.

Hello, my name is Mark Flexman and I am the Service Planning Manager at Bournemouth University. I've been at the University for a number of years in mostly network and infrastructure related roles, moving over to processes and governance about 18 months or so ago. My role is varied and covers all manner of things such as asset and configuration management, service management, the service catalogue, DR and Business Continuity planning and co-ordination and I am the also chair of CAB managing change and service transition activities. Basically ITIL and anything to do with production services! At the end of the day my primary role is to protect the production environment, it's as simple (and as complex) as that.

We know that the deployment is for Bournemouth University, what are some of the challenges in running IT Service Management in an educational environment. Are the challenges different to managing ITSM in a corporate organization?

The main challenge for me is to keep track with what is going on, I feel sometimes like I'm herding sheep!

We have around 1700 staff and 17,000 students and as you can imagine things are constantly changing to ensure the best of experiences for all of our students and staff while they are at BU. We are always being asked to do something whether through responding to incidents, request fulfilment or though infrastructure change. At any moment in time we can have 40 active change requests and a similar number of development projects on the go.

I don't think our challenges are any different to any other organization to be honest. We too have a business to run, we have people wanting to use our services and we believe in service excellence as many others do. Our main consumers just happen to be students!

Where was the organization before this project to move to ServiceNow in terms of process maturity and ITSM awareness amongst the IT organization? What were the factors in starting the project?

We have been an 'ITIL department' for a good number of years, focusing mainly around change management for the last 5+ years. My role was created about 2 years ago when the concept of service management and striving for service excellence was really becoming very much part and parcel of what and how we do things. So we were in fairly good shape in terms of process maturity and ITSM awareness.

I started the project in July last year and it focused solely on asset and configuration management. We didn't have an effective hardware and software license management system that I was confident in. It consisted of spread sheets here, databases there. We really needed to step up a gear and sort things out. I never imagined that the project would get as big as it did!

I read a Service desk benchmarking report recently that claims that 41% of organisations use less than half of the feature set of their ITSM toolset.

That's obviously interesting for us a vendor. What processes are you currently running in ServiceNow, what is in your pipeline and what parts of the product do you think you'll never use.

Ok, so as I said the project expanded somewhat and on 8th December we went live with the following:-

• Self Service
• Incident Management (replacing our existing service desk system)
• Request fulfilment (everything used to be treated as an incident)
• Configuration Management (utilising discovery and integration with our existing Microsoft SCCM system)
• Problem Management
• Software Licence Management
• Asset Portfolio and Contract management

We are also using some of the other features of ServiceNow including

• Knowledge Base (replacing our existing wiki containing over 1500 documents)
• Reporting
• We also integrate with our existing AD infrastructure for user authentication and ServiceNow group membership administration

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be introducing Change Management, and by Easter we will also be using the system for facilities management. IT and the Estates function are part of a combined directorate here at BU so it makes sense to have a one-stop shop for all our services and management tools.

Are there features of ServiceNow we will never use? Hard to say to be honest as we are still learning what it can do and how powerful it is. Project management, timecards, HR, SDLC and Business Service Management are all things we may utilize in the medium term. We just don't know but I would say never say never to anything!

A lot of the recent ITSM buzz on Twitter (where you and I met up) has been around Customer Satisfaction. How do you measure that at Bournemouth Uni, and is ServiceNow a part of the solution for tracking this metric?

We do measure satisfaction and we will use the survey tool and the service management module within ServiceNow to help us continue to do this.

Lastly — having gotten to the point of deploying ServiceNow what's next for your IT organization?

This is just the beginning and I think the next 12 months will be just as exciting in terms of the use of ServiceNow within BU.

Thanks very much Mark!