CASE STUDY
F
ounded in 1209, the University of
Cambridge consists of 31 colleges and
100 academic departments. Gaining
one of the cherished 20,000 student places
is the reserve of the extremely academic.
Once students have gained their coveted
place, they have access to 10,000 academic
and admin staff to support their studies.
Equally important to the modern-day
Cambridge learning experience is having
constant access from any Internet device, to
digitally enabled infrastructure services.
Consolidating service desks
In 2015, two independent IT support
divisions each running their own separate
service desk merged into one University
Information Services (UIS) department with
300 staff. Their remit – to provide cohesive IT
support to the University’s 20,000 end-users
that conforms to ITIL best practices, with
expansion capabilities to 65,000 accounts
for support staff, alumni, visiting researchers,
students and those with multiple IT users. Steve Hoensch, Head of Frontline Services,
UIS, understood that the new department’s
service delivery ambitions would only be
fulfilled with a service management solution
available centrally in the cloud.
Given the size of the environment and the
disparate nature of former IT helpdesks, the
opportunity to merge and modernise could
not have arrived soon enough. Both service
desk systems leveraged entirely different
software, both classified all queries as
incidents and both offered limited ticketing
capabilities with no metrics for reporting.
With no linkage possible between the
systems, tickets were lost, staff and student
confidence plummeted and complaints were
frequent. The situation escalated at the
start of each academic year as new students
arrived and inbound queries peaked. Once established, this infrastructure solution
would assist not just IT, but would also
help automate processes across estates,
HR, finance and operations. Steve recalled
how decisions to deployment were made:
“We had taken the previous service desk
systems as far as we could. Not only were
they incompatible, they were falling out of
hardware support, which left us vulnerable
and unable to band-aid the systems any
further. It was apparent that with the new
UIS department framework, we needed
to offer a single portal solution for future
centralised services that would give us the
WE NEEDED TO
OFFER A SINGLE
PORTAL SOLUTION
FOR FUTURE
CENTRALISED
SERVICES THAT
WOULD GIVE
US THE UNIFIED
STRUCTURE TO
WORK EFFICIENTLY
AND COHESIVELY.
unified structure to work efficiently and
cohesively and provide reporting so that
we can understand and improve on the
student’s digital experience.”
Five vendors were invited to present their
solutions directly to the new UIS group before
reducing the shortlist to two. Before the final
decision was made, the services team spent
two days on-site consulting their peers at
University of Oxford, gaining valuable insights
into how they had made similar decisions
three years prior when the University of
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