Key objectives for ServiceNow within an educational environment are to connect departments, increase collaboration, and secure the campus through digital transformation. With this new technology, universities can better help their students in every stage of their journey, as well as protect their institution’s future in the process.
The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) moved in this direction by implementing the ServiceNow platform to provide students with modern tools at every stage of the process from applicant to alumni.
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Creating a Team and a Vision
Director of Technology Debby Eyzaguirre explains, “A new Enterprise Service Management (ESM) program was created that required a team of open-minded and dedicated individuals—individuals who would embrace a new way of design thinking and rise to the challenge of quickly learning a new technology. This team was created with existing IT resources to support the UTSA strategy for digital transformation, and through the acquisition of new technical skills, began the roll-out process for this enterprise application platform.
UTSA still needed an implementation partner for ITSM that possessed the expert technical capabilities to augment the new team. A funding model was created to engage a partner to assist with the initial ServiceNow platform implementation.”
Selecting a Partner
UTSA went through the standard RFP and selection process and the work was awarded to InSource. InSource was selected because of their experience and their skilled technical expertise which was required for this new program. The CIO and CTO were also familiar with InSource because of InSource’s prior success at another state university.
From the beginning, InSource has been an excellent partner with every aspect of contract management being approached with collaboration and team building. Debby joined UTSA after the ITSM implementation project had already been started. The InSource account and project teams welcomed her and immediately brought her up to speed.
They were extremely flexible and a true extension of the ESM team and their collaboration and partnership with the team has been seamless and evident throughout the entire tenure of this project.
InSource’s ServiceNow platform expertise enhanced the ESM team’s capabilities because this was a new platform for the UTSA organization. Even though the technical team had been training on the ServiceNow platform, they did not have any hands-on experience.
UTSA utilized InSource to lead the project and to enhance the technical staff with their technical skills and best-practices approach in architectural design, administrative processes, and workflow implementation. After each implementation, there was a knowledge transfer session, specifically for the technical team. This session covered all the configuration and workflow to support the application.
The sessions were informative and allowed the technical team to ask questions pertaining to the assigned modules. The sessions were recorded so that they could be reviewed afterwards. “The partnership and synergy between the teams continues to be genuine and extremely productive,” says Eyzaguirre.
Current Review
The results have been excellent:
- ITSM – 8 months, on-time, under budget
- SPM – 5 months, on-time, under budget
- HRSD Pro – 6 months, on-time, over budget (due to increased scope)
“The ESM program has simplified and increased the efficiency of services throughout the university to the benefit of faculty, staff, and students,” says Eyzaguirre. “This program yielded immediate benefits by streamlining current UTSA support and services processes, creating true workflow automations of requests, proactive monitoring and remediation of service issues, and greater integration into multiple core systems.”
For ITSM, they continue to bring in the distributed IT areas across the organization. Additionally, they are bringing all the distributed web governance groups onto the platform.
Next Steps
IT is now seeking strategic funding to move forward with the CSM application. UTSA will use this for all non-IT ticketing capabilities, specifically, for the business service centers which is a newly formed staffing model in each of the colleges, as well as large departments that administer their own specific financial and HR processes.
Eyzaguirre adds, “InSource is a major component of our continued success and the adoption of the platform and UTSA welcomes the opportunity to share our positive experience with other organizations.”