Bournemouth U Consolidates Systems with IT Service Automation Suite

Bournemouth University in England has consolidated numerous IT systems to increase automation and provide a self-service option for faculty, staff, and students.

The university's IT department used to have a "hodgepodge of tools," none of which were flexible enough to manage the broad scope of its IT processes, according to Mark Flexman, service planning manager for the university. “As a result, we didn’t have visibility into our IT assets, which made our hardware and software license management system ineffective," he said in a prepared statement. "In addition, our request fulfillment process was not well managed, causing frustration among our users.”

To solve the problem, the university implemented the ServiceNow IT Service Automation Suite, software-as-a-service that manages incidents, changes, configuration, requests, a knowledge base, and IT assets through a single system. According to the company, the solution has helped the university's IT department become more efficient and enabled them to shift IT staff from system administration to more strategic projects. The company also reported that faculty and students enjoy being able to use the self-service knowledge base to solve problems themselves, especially in the evening when there is more student demand for IT support.

“Since migrating to ServiceNow, we’ve seen dramatic changes,” added Flexman. “We understand root causes of our problems better, can prioritize our top service requests and quickly identify who we need to inform when services are affected.”

Bournemouth University is located on two campuses on the southern coast of England. It serves more than 18,000 students and employes 1,700 faculty and staff.

Further information about the ServiceNow IT Service Automation Suite can be found at servicenow.com.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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