From “homegrown” to Ivanti Service Management in the cloudInformation technology in education.

The University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP) was founded in 1887 as the Croatan Normal School to educate Native American teachers. To reinforce its goal of changing lives through education, UNCP today offers small classes and a low 16:1 student-faculty ratio in its 41 undergraduate and 17 graduate programs. The campus is considered one of the most diverse in the nation, with 62 percent of 6,200 students identified and minorities.

Industry: Education

Website: http://uncp.edu/

Products

Service Manager

This solution, deployed in the cloud or on-premise, helps IT departments modernize the service desk and deliver more value to the business. Organizations can: 1) reduce service desk call volume by up to 80% with the help of knowledge management tools; 2) reduce downtime due to unplanned or unapproved changes by up to 75%, cutting IT costs; and 3) reduce the number of status calls received by up to 80%, improving service quality and compliance.

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IT support hamstrung by manual processes and discrete tools

UNCP started as a small university, with many services and systems homegrown. IT support was time-consuming and frustrating for everyone. The IT team had virtually no inventory or configuration database, no knowledge database, and no service catalog except for a web-based form for data-processing requests. Technicians in the field didn’t have context surrounding previous incidents. UNCP needed better tools to deliver the kind of IT support to fit the university’s mission of bringing a personal touch to higher education.

Benefits to UNCP

A cloud-hosted solution

“We wanted something cloud-hosted, something our internal people didn’t have to manage,” says Wes Frazier, Academic Applications Administrator. “We host so many systems that we didn’t want to manage another thing.” Plus, he says, people could access a web-based service management system from any device, especially mobile.

A service management platform that scales

Ivanti Service Manager has met UNCP’s immediate needs for incident response and a knowledge management system, and it represents a platform that can grow as IT support matures and adds capabilities such as change management.

Context-sensitive search

Following a demo of Service Manager by Ivanti representatives, Wes Frazier commented, “We were blown out of the water by the context-sensitive search in Ivanti. It unifies everything—incidents and knowledgebase—right off the bat. It’s highly configurable without having to drop down into code. You can’t ask for better than that.”

Paper-based process eliminated

The applications team is using Ivanti to automate business workflows, including reporting requests that require approvals from different department managers and data stewards. By tracking the approval process through Ivanti, IT has eliminated a paper-based process and can ensure that the reports are completed faster and with less effort.

Keeping pace with employee transitions and student enrollment

The Educational and Client Technology Group (ECT) uses Ivanti to track employee onboarding and offboarding. Doing so ensures that new users have access to the appropriate applications and networks—and those access rights are terminated when users are no longer at the university.

Using data to drive better decisions

Says Wes Frazier, “You can query all the business objects in the product. In Ivanti training, we were amazed at how much data we had about our systems, how we could run queries against it, and how narrowly we could define data. Our leadership was thrilled when they realized what data we were getting that we didn’t have before.”

A proven platform for today and tomorrow

“Our organization is young when it comes to service management,” says Frazier. “Ivanti has proven itself in that it’s good for us now, and it can grow with us for the future. It’s not overly intimidating to learn or use if you’re just coming into service management. And it’s been a good mirror for us to examine our own process and find other ways to streamline and automate.”

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