IT Support

Oxford Consolidates IT Support Operations With Cloud-Based Service Desk

• By Rhea Kelly
• 09/17/15

England's University of Oxford now has a single cloud-based service desk supporting 30,000 users, 100 departments and 38 colleges. The institution deployed HEAT Software's service management product in an effort to consolidate its central IT department, run more efficiently and provide a better digital experience for students.

Oxford's IT department is challenged with supporting IT use for both past and present students, as well as onboarding thousands of new students each year. Prior to the consolidation, the institution had three independent IT teams — for business systems, shared services and managed desktop computing — each with its own service desk. With the decentralized structure, it was increasingly difficult for the university to manage and track its IT services.

The HEAT service desk helped the university bring its central IT groups together, support IT users from a single point of contact, and provide a self-service solution with an online portal for the student community, according to a company statement. "Being able to access everything from a Web browser was an important consideration for Oxford, given the variety of devices, IT processes and applications supported. For example, user groups ranged from students on laptops, overseas research teams on portable devices and some IT users even accessing e-mail from their car dashboard."

"A student's digital experience is an increasingly important part of university life," commented John Ireland, director of customer services at the University of Oxford, in a press release. "IT has a huge impact on a student's ability to study and communicate with their peers and educators, so making sure they have the best digital experience possible is essential. With HEAT, straight away I could see that we were purchasing a very powerful and configurable tool, which would provide visibility across our entire IT support operations. The 'out of the box' processes available with HEAT were easily configured to map with our project goals. Our partnership with HEAT Software will play an important role in keeping thousands of IT users operational and our IT teams happy."