Improving the Service Desk Experience

In order to provide cost effective and high availability systems and service the IT department at Athabasca embarked on a journey to align to best practice service management methodologies and tools. Additionally, we wanted... [ view full abstract ]

In order to provide cost effective and high availability systems and service the IT department at Athabasca embarked on a journey to align to best practice service management methodologies and tools. Additionally, we wanted to provide the clients of IT with increased usability and visibility into the services provided by the IT department through a self-service portal which is available 7 x 24 to meet their needs, while providing IT with a tool to better target the right resource to resolve the issue or request submitted. Additionally we wanted our users to see the status of their issues and requests when it was convenient for them rather than phoning the service desk which is only available 8 – 4 business days.

As with all projects, we needed to balance operational demands and project demands on the teams time, and to accomplish this we engaged a partner Integritas to bring their expertise to augment our resources and deliver a sharing/mentoring implementation.

This project was a combination of people, processes and technology. It involved the implementation of the ServiceNow platform to enable and automate the IT Processes, and leveraged online meeting technology to engage stakeholders and reduce project costs.

Make sure you build in the people management effort to ensure adoption of the new processes and tool and improve over time.

We believe that as a post-secondary we have to do things better and move to a service orientation. Students have far greater expectations of technology and IT has to support it