Streamlining, automating and elevating support for UCC staff and students

University College Cork (UCC) is one of the most prestigious and largest higher education institutions, ranked in the top 2% of universities globally. It’s proudly held a top ten place in the UI GreenMetric World University Rankings since 2010 and is now ranked 2nd in the world for sustainability. UCC is always looking for new ways to improve how its historic campus functions, delivering staff and students a world-class experience that will attract the best talent.

Why Ivanti?

The university’s legacy on-premises IT service management (ITSM) system had served it well for almost 10 years but was soon to be out of service support. The system no longer met the university’s growing need to deliver the kind of modern, automated and full function self-service experience that staff and students increasingly expect.

Ivanti is part of Ireland’s Asiera procurement framework for higher education and research. Asiera’s brokerage team conducts thorough due diligence on suppliers, which gave UCC confidence in Ivanti’s credibility and experience.

A strong endorsement from another leading UK university already succeeding with Ivanti significantly accelerated their decision. UCC wanted a cloud-based ITSM solution that could integrate end-to-end across key areas of its diverse operation, not just the IT department, centralising management, automating everyday functions and streamlining workflows.

The challenge

UCC’s legacy on-premises ITSM system lacked functionality, automation and self-service options. There were no live reporting features, making it difficult to spot and address trends in real time. Change management and approvals were very basic and manual too, making those processes slow and time-consuming. And reporting was arduous, with all change requests needing to be exported first, putting an extra strain on UCC’s busy admin teams.

UCC’s Student IT team identified a requirement for an IT Service Management (ITSM) solution to support student IT services for the upcoming academic year. The need for a modern system was driven by the significant annual volume of support tickets, which existing tools were no longer equipped to manage effectively.

In parallel, the Academic Services department submitted a high-priority request to implement an Enterprise Service Management (ESM) platform to improve call management ahead of the new academic year. To address these combined needs, UCC engaged Ivanti to provide expert guidance and implementation support.

UCC’s goals

The university wanted to improve its support service’s response times to incidents and service requests and transform the user experience for staff and students, creating a ‘one-stop-shop’ for ticket logging across departments.

It knew that a unified, real-time ticketing system would help to centralise all support requests and enable efficient issue tracking, prioritisation and resolution. Self-service functionality would also give staff and students greater control, empowering them to self-serve when it came to logging tickets and using the knowledge base, which could greatly reduce administrative overheads.

The proposed solution

Each solution Ivanti delivers is bespoke to their client’s challenges and needs. So, the expert team started by directly scoping UCC’s existing services and getting a clear idea of the issues as well as the potential for improvement. They suggested that their Ivanti Neurons for ITSM ESM solution would be a powerful way forward, integrating multiple teams and departments for better visibility and control in one state-of-the-art platform.

Critically, UCC wanted to automate workflows, eliminating costly manual processes, while making requests faster and more efficiently to avoid any backlogs. The fully compliant, flexible and scalable system that Ivanti was proposing would achieve that alongside real-time reporting, resulting in enhanced decision-making, improved efficiency and greatly simplified compliance. New paperless processes would also support the team’s ongoing sustainability goals, a key focus for UCC.

The Ivanti team proposed adding Neurons automated self-service platform to empower UCC’s staff and student users to initiate and manage certain requests themselves. This would achieve a combined benefit of speeding issue resolution by putting users in control while significantly reducing the burden on admin and IT support teams.

Seamless deployment in record time

Ivanti was engaged in November 2021. Delivery experts worked in close collaboration with the UCC project team, sharing insightful product demos, followed by in‑depth discovery calls and team meetings. This collaborative process helped define UCC’s specific requirements across each department. Physical deployment began in June 2022, with Ivanti taking a phased approach to ensure continuity during critical academic periods while delivering incremental value across the institution. As a result, UCC began to see—and feel—the benefits of the project quickly.

A carefully prioritised, phased rollout

• UCC had identified Student IT Services, as their highest priority. By October 2022, the Ivanti team had worked closely with them to create a cutting-edge new self-service portal enabling students to directly log support tickets to the IT department.
• By December 2022, the Academic Services team were onboarded. The team was delighted with the new system which automated a range of key processes, particularly those relating to previously frustrating approval workflows, speeding appropriate and secure access to their main academic systems.
• The full onboarding of the IT Services team commenced in January 2023, bringing 100 analysts within five teams and 20 escalation groups onto the platform. The whole IT department was fully onboarded and migrated from the old system by August 2023.
• Next, the focus turned to UCC’s Office of Corporate and Legal Affairs, with UCC’s Enterprise Risk Management team (ERM) live on the system by the end of September 2023, in time for the new academic year. The new system provides a centralised platform for request handling, making it easier to track, organise and resolve issues as a team, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions.
• This was followed by a significant IT Change Management project, which involved building a new change management module and automating approval and change control for the department.
• By the summer of 2024, the UCC Finance Office had the system customised and rolled out to the Procurement team.
• Later that year, the system was further extended and tailored to include the People and Culture Office. A new Human Resource Information System (HRIS) was set up with admin staff onboarded by January 2025. Automated workflows and the delivery of robust trend analysis and reports quickly transformed team efficiency, insight and value.  In April 2026, the ESM system was further used across UCC’s People and Culture  organisation, when the Pensions Office was onboarded.
• Next, the Ivanti project team worked closely with UCC’s Building and Estates (B&E) facilities department, onboarding them to the system in May 2025. The department used their new system to process over 5,400 requests within the first nine months alone, digitising health and safety workflows and replacing paper‑based processes with mobile, auditable workflows aligned to UCC’s important sustainability goals. This roll out also embraced a mobile solution for staff who are frequently out and about on the campus. This included built-in risk assessment and health and safety assessments, in what UCC’s Buildings Officer called “A major step forward in efficiency and sustainability for Buildings & Estates”. The digitisation of ‘Safe Systems of Work’, risk assessments and job tracking replaced paper‑based processes, helping to transform team effectiveness and efficiency and directly supporting UCC’s sustainability objectives. Mobile access for estates staff working across campus has improved response times and data accuracy too and transformed compliance visibility and audit readiness.
• The Career Services team was onboarded in November 2025. People & Culture Pensions Office in April 2026 with both teams now using the system to manage all queries and incident reporting to their helpdesk. Managers can access all paperwork digitally and associate it with tickets.

Success powered by training and super users

Successful adoption is a key part of any transformation, which is why Ivanti provided in depth training to UCC’s internal team on the configuration of the platform. In-house training supervisors and ‘super users’ were also assigned.

This ‘super user’ approach allows departments to create their own dashboards and develop their own workflows and service request offerings, with custom views that meet their own team’s need.

By localising and customising their own solutions and delegating at project level, everything isn’t constantly escalated. This dramatically decreases workloads for main administrators, freeing them to focus on more high-level technical functions and tasks while leaving super users to handle reporting and dashboards.

Immediate results delivered

UCC was supported by a dedicated Ivanti project manager throughout the implementation, ensuring continuity and a clear point of accountability across the entirety of the project. A strong working relationship with UCC’s IT project team enabled close collaboration and a seamless deployment of the new ESM system.

Positive impacts have been felt quickly across the organisation:

• Enhanced staff and student service experience: Automation has accelerated ticket resolution with 48% of requests now logged via self‑service, reducing back‑and‑forth and accelerating time to resolution. A 55% first‑time resolution has been maintained despite significant growth in demand, supported by structured forms and knowledge.
• High student satisfaction: UCC has achieved an outstanding 95% student satisfaction for Student IT services and received lots of positive feedback from students, who are very satisfied with the new self-serve ticketing system. Feedback from their annual Student IT survey shows that they love that issues are now escalated and resolved faster and more efficiently.
• Streamlined onboarding: 5,000 university students starting the new academic year were directed to an online form for automated account set-up rather than having to email an IT mailbox for manual support. This big shift was well received by students and increased productivity and process alignment within IT.
• Protecting frontline capacity during peak academic periods: With a 68% reduction in email traffic and 26% reduction in telephone demands, admin teams are free to deliver frontline help as and when its needed.
• Operational efficiency and governance: Over 37,000 requests are now handled annually across seven Departments, providing full visibility of demand and performance.
• Reduced change disruption: A new calendar-enabled change management module provides visibility into overlapping changes, allowing for better management and planning and minimising disruption to IT services.
• Improved change management visibility and audit trails: Automated change management also delivers real‑time dashboards enabling data‑driven decisions and risk‑based governance.
• Cost optimization: The hybrid mix of concurrent and fixed-term licencing models allows for budgetary control, with the concurrent model allowing UCC to keep licence costs lower, especially across IT Services which employs approximately 35 part-time student staff. while a lower TCO and low-code/no-code capabilities eliminate costly developer requirements.
• Smart helpdesk channel redesign: Year‑on‑year following the deployment, staff contacts have shifted from mailbox and phone to structured digital channels with emails down 68% and calls down 26%. Supervisor escalations have been reduced 18% and a 41% expansion of staff Knowledge Base content drove a massive 360% rise in use. It’s all evidence of successful channel redesign enabling stronger first‑line capabilities and sustained service quality at peak academic periods.
• Cloud first: Cloud technology reduces the need for infrastructure maintenance, appliances or software upgrades, saving time and resources.
• Efficient processes: The approval process is faster, giving admins better visibility, accountability and audit trails, and overall leaner processes.
• Data-driven insights: Real-time reporting and dashboards enable analysts to make intelligent, data-driven decisions. At management level, visibility across trends and pressure points supports effective, data-driven decision-making.
• Service continuity: There are no more ageing tickets or missed requests due to traffic volumes. The automation of follow-up emails to users and the closure of non-responsive tickets has led to a cleaner, simpler system.
• Tech for good: The UCC IT Service desk is run by 35 part-time students, providing hands‑on experience with an enterprise ESM platform. This supports UCC’s own service resilience while building valuable digital and operational skills that help to improve each student’s employability after graduation.
• Digitisation of paper‑based processes across operations: This is enhancing UCC’s sustainability goals as well as their audit readiness.

Ongoing support and growing success

Ivanti continues to engage in steering group calls and is viewed as a trusted extension of UCC’s IT Services team. Executive buy-in was key from the outset, and Dr. Gerard Culley, Director of IT Services in UCC was committed to develop a strong customer-supplier relationship.  

UCC has achieved its objective of providing a ‘one-stop-shop’ for all student and staff service requests across key departments. The next priority is to migrate additional departments to the Enterprise Management System.

Since its launch, the UCC Services Portal powered by Ivanti Neurons for ITSM has grown year on year. Annual request volumes have increased from just over 1,000 in 2022 to more than 31,000 in 2025, reflecting a strong enterprise‑wide adoption across academic, professional and operational services.

During the same period, incident volumes have stabilised despite a significant growth in users, showing that the team has achieved a successful shift from a culture of reactive support to structured, self‑service‑led service delivery.

“Ivanti has helped UCC to transform how students and staff engage with university services,” Lorraine McLoughlin, UCC’s  IT Service Delivery Manager shares.

“By reducing reliance on email and manual processes, we have improved visibility, response times and consistency, even during peak academic periods. For staff, it has enabled clearer workflows and better insight into demand, supporting a more proactive, people‑centred service model.”

“I would recommend Ivanti as they were very responsive and understood the specific needs of an academic environment. We have now streamlined processes within a unified, integrated system, enabling us to deliver a much more efficient, effective service to both staff and students.”