A sustainable approach to drive continuous improvement
Established in 1991 in Western Australia, Edith Cowan University (ECU) is ranked as a world top 100 Young University by Times Higher Education and currently has 30,000 students.
For 17 consecutive years, ECU’s teaching quality has won five-star ratings from graduates in the Good Universities Guide. It has also received five-star ratings for overall experience, learning resources, skills development, and student support.
With three main sites and a new ECU City campus set to open in 2026, the university’s Service Management and Improvements team seeks to drive continuous ITSM improvements and deliver exceptional student and employee experiences.
“Our IT department supports over 300 applications and services for 1,900 academic and professional staff,” says Hollie Winfield, Senior Service Analyst for Service Management, and Improvements at Edith Cowan University. “With a strategic plan to focus on organizational sustainability, we have to ensure that the processes governing the IT environment remain relevant and our staff have the right tools at the right time.”
Empowering users to be self-sufficient
Before ServiceNow, ECU used two legacy ITSM tools and had to involve the respective vendors when a configuration or process change was required. There were hundreds of different paper forms used all over the university, making it difficult for users to submit requests and for the service improvement team to track and implement them.
In 2013, the university rolled out the Digital and Campus Services (DCS) portal for staff underpinned by ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM). A public portal was built utilizing Microsoft Forms for students to submit requests that would automatically connect to ServiceNow to create a ticket. This enables the IT team to efficiently manage requests from staff and students and improve service operations efficiency.
“One of the main drivers for adopting ServiceNow was its configurability,” Hollie explains. “We can now implement changes much faster than before.”
ECU historically used websites to provide IT service information, but only a small number of people were able to edit the information. There were no FAQs for end users, so resolving requests was a time-consuming process.
Before developing its knowledge base, ECU did not have a consolidated location for end-user documentation, and when service desk staff received queries from staff or students, they had to search multiple locations for relevant help sheets and instructions before sending the information to users.
With ServiceNow Knowledge Management, users can now access information digitally from a single DCS portal, instead of contacting the IT services desk. This automation allows scheduled revisions and enables the university to define which roles—such as contractors or students—can access any given content.
Since the adoption of Knowledge Management, ECU has created 687 articles across five knowledge bases, including IT services, facilities, and DCS public, along with information on known errors and ServiceNow configurations.
ECU also uses the Service Catalog to replace paper forms. Hollie and her team have developed over 189 digital forms over the last ten years, 142 of which are still in use. In the last year alone these digital forms have been utilized more than 12,000 times.
“By using Service Catalog and Knowledge Management, we have reduced the number of repeatable requests from users and saved more than 60 days in service management in one year,” Hollie says. “Our staff can now focus on more strategic tasks to improve the user experience.”
She continues: “We had been using the customer satisfaction survey feature, but had to turn it off. The main complaint was: ‘You guys are great! Why do I have to keep telling you?’”
Improving governance on asset management
With over 16,000 end-point devices, including computers, AV equipment, and mobile phones managed by the IT team, ECU wanted to better track devices that had been assigned to users and to improve governance on asset lifecycle management.
In the past, ECU had to rely on whoever purchased a device to register it in a static database. This lack of live data meant neither finance nor the IT team could track what devices the university had in the field, who had them, and where they were located, which meant they could not track investments or plan for future ones.
“Our previous approach to asset lifecycle management was reactive,” Hollie says. “For example, we ordered laptops for users but never heard from them again. When finance ran audits, no one knew where the devices were.”
ECU used Service Graph Connectors within ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) Discovery to ingest data from Microsoft InTune, JAMF, and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager directly into the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This now gives a single source of truth for IT assets and enables ECU to proactively manage asset lifecycles. The Finance team now has real-time insights into device histories and can provide evidence for auditing, such as generating a signature PDF when a device is deployed.
“ServiceNow has given us visibility of what tasks are being done, how long they take, and whether end users are satisfied with the outcome,” Hollie says.
Linking the asset management information in the CMDB to the service portal, staff can view the list of ‘My Assets’ and request a device retirement or new order. This automated ordering and updating of asset information has significantly increased the capability of non-IT staff to manage their equipment. With self-service, ECU has processed 2,422 requests from end users, including 341 device retirements and 779 new computer and tablet orders, over the last year.
“Asset management is now an auditable process, which was something we didn’t have before,” Hollie says. “By using ITSM with ITOM, we can optimize asset utilization, avoid device loss, and ensure compliance with relevant policies for managing devices.”
Managing project portfolios and demand with ease
Another challenge the university faced was inconsistent reporting processes across multiple projects for digital services. Staff had to manually collate data and create status reports. There was little visibility outside the immediate process teams to track demands, project statuses, and costs, making it difficult to plan and manage project work.
By adopting ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), ECU now gains real-time visibility into a project’s status and milestone tasks via a single dashboard. This helps to ensure consistency in project planning and align the digital master plan with the university’s digital goals. Linking project tasks to change records also helps improve governance and enables early-impact analysis on pipeline initiatives.
“Leveraging SPM to automatically collate and update data in the tasks throughout the lifecycle of the project, we are seeing an up to 80% increase in program reporting efficiency,” Hollie says.
With support from ServiceNow Partner, Accelerate IT Solutions, ECU configured the platform so users can edit status report fields and add images to the report without any issues.
“Previously, we had fixed character limits and plain text only in the report. It was also difficult to view the report in PDF,” Hollie explains. “With SPM, we can easily create status reports as HTML files. The report actually looks pretty and we love this capability!”
The engagement team for digital service projects also works with Hollie and her team to understand what initiatives can support the university. By using Demand Management with Project Portfolio Management features, the engagement team can consolidate a pipeline of major, minor, and operational works. This helps ensure the information is accessible and accurate for reporting and prioritizing workloads fairly.
“Having SPM with ITSM on a single intelligent platform with ServiceNow, we now have the visibility into our initiative roadmap for digital services,” Hollie says. “This allows people to see the value of what they are doing and how it aligns with our strategies.”
Streamlining field service
ECU’s School of Engineering implemented ServiceNow Field Service Management (FSM) to streamline the tracking and management of technical support requests. Over the past three years, users have logged more than 6,800 work orders seeking assistance in various areas, including teaching spaces and the laboratory administration office.
FSM brings enhanced transparency, streamlined communication, increased efficiency, data-driven decision-making, and improved customer satisfaction to the School of Engineering at ECU.
With FSM, the team now has visibility into what tasks are being done, their duration, and the satisfaction of end users with the outcomes.
Accelerating time to value with ServiceNow Impact
Organizations wanting to embrace new features are often held back by system modifications made over many years, and as a result, many choose to reimplement the platform. At ECU, Hollie and her team wanted to close the gap in the legacy platform and maximize the value of the university’s investment.
As ECU’s requirements have evolved since the first deployment of ServiceNow over a decade ago, Hollie and her team used ServiceNow Impact to build a roadmap showing the key capabilities of each solution. It provides valuable insights for the team to identify what they were licensed for but not utilizing, and prioritize changes as they modernized the platform.
“I used to do the analysis for capability roadmap manually. Thanks to ServiceNow Impact, I can show the roadmap to management in a visually compelling format without having to do a week of work,” Hollie explains. “This saved us a lot of time in understanding the best value from the implementation roadmap.”
ECU also uses ServiceNow Impact to optimize its platform health by conducting regular health assessments on security, upgradeability, performance, manageability, and user experience. This enables the university to pinpoint problem areas and determine which legacy data and services would be valuable and should be restored.
Since the adoption of ServiceNow Impact in early 2023, ECU has boosted its overall platform health score to 85%, with manageability up to 83%, upgradeability improved to 92%, and an impressive 88% user experience.
“ServiceNow Impact is incredibly valuable,” Hollie notes. “We used to spend three months completing certain upgrades. With ServiceNow Impact, this has been reduced to just three and a half weeks.”
She adds: “Something that was considered best practice several versions ago may not be anymore because of the way new functions are configured. Instead of digging through documentation and reading every single detail in the releases, ServiceNow Impact helps us fast-track best practices and gives us peace of mind that we are going in the right direction.”
ECU’s management sets out operational objectives to be achieved every year and with ServiceNow Impact, Hollie and her team can now reach those objectives much faster. It also allows the team to weigh up the pros and cons of each idea and make smarter decisions to meet expectations.
“We are leveraging the capabilities we have with ServiceNow to drive continuous service improvement across all products and achieve faster ROI with ServiceNow Impact,” Hollie concludes.