Smart workflows help The University of Adelaide deliver an amazing user experience

Improving service delivery to staff and students
The University of Adelaide sees itself as an enabler of a digital learning experience that empowers students and staff to do their work more effectively, while preparing them for the rapidly changing world of work. But with complex business needs and the range of different stakeholders, Scott Pearce, Manager of IT Service Delivery at the University of Adelaide, explains: “We needed a platform that could support a large complex organization and support our strategic roadmap, while at the same time helping our users be more efficient rather than slowing them down.

“ServiceNow became a clear choice because of its ongoing investment not just in people but also research and development in their platform. This enables our IT teams and community to be one step further to fulfill its vision,” says Scott.

To achieve that vision and deliver a better user experience, the University of Adelaide focused on a service operations approach by implementing ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) for the IT department, student support, research services, and service providers in its schools and faculties.

The university worked with ServiceNow partner Enable Professional Services for design work and the change management process. Enable also helped to engage in training with different working groups and connect with other universities to show the value of the ServiceNow platform and share best practice approaches.

“Enable has been a phenomenal partner throughout the process. They embedded themselves into the university to understand how we work and make sure that we didn’t just put a process in that no one uses. We learned what we could achieve with ServiceNow, and the best way to do it,” Scott explains.

Better user satisfaction with 80% less processing time
By connecting the workflows of six different processes with ServiceNow ITSM, users can now do live chats, access catalogs, and track their requests and approvals via a single ‘My IT’ service portal. The university has also created around 1,800 knowledge articles that enable students and staff to easily access important dates and relevant organizational information from any device, anywhere. Users no longer need to call, email, or tap someone on the shoulder to get support. In the first month alone following the deployment, 2,500 calls were deflected to the self-service portal and 200 live chats were recorded in the first week. On top of this, 100% of the IT support teams have also logged into the ServiceNow platform and 95% of users are fully trained since the implementation.

“Thanks to the automation with ServiceNow, there were more than 20,000 requests through the self-service portal in just few months. We have also seen 80% reduction in time to manage service requests,” says Scott. “The digital app and the live chat function in the self-service portal makes it so easy for users to communicate with us. This is reflected in our regular surveys which showed a 20% improvement in satisfaction rating.”

Increasing service availability and minimizing disruption
As a large complex organization, the university had a large number of assets in its database (which equates to roughly 1,500 servers, 15,000 computers, 2,000 printers, 900 network devices, and 400 applications), spread over different locations—in hospitals, schools, private offices, and government buildings.

Before ServiceNow, the IT team had to manually search multiple databases or spreadsheets, make phone calls or trawl through emails to find asset information. By standardizing and collating the data with ServiceNow ITOM, the university now has a single view of its IT infrastructure to ensure data integrity and minimize the risk of system outage or service degradation.

“By integrating ServiceNow Discovery with Configuration Management Database (CMDB), we now have greater insight of what assets are potentially related to an outage and can take faster action to fix the issues,” explains Scott. “With almost 98% accuracy of discovery data, we have reduced disruption to users. This also gives confidence to our business that we have reliable information to make better decisions.

“A further benefit was ensuring that, in a COVID-19 world which has only accelerated a growing need for technology, we can support people working remotely and access digital IT services,” says Scott.

Looking ahead, the goal is to expand ServiceNow in software and hardware management and other areas of service delivery aligned with the university’s strategic plan for 2022-2023.

Scott concludes: “There is a really big interest from other business units such as HR, finance, legal, facilities, student admissions, and the legal team. They have seen what we’ve done so far and the return on investment we have achieved. They are eager to get on board to accelerate their transformation.”

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