customer success story: University of New South Wales
University of New South Wales
improves IT service quality and
cost control with centralised
management.
Benefit Summary
Business Overview
The University of New South Wales (UNSW) is a leading Australian research and teaching
university with more than 40,000 students. With a 60-year history of outstanding achievement,
UNSW aims to become one of the top three research universities in Australia. The university is
already ranked highly both nationally and internationally for educational excellence.
Challenge
Customer Profile
Industry: Education
Organisation: University of
New South Wales
Employees: Over 6,000
Students: Over 40,000
To achieve its academic goals within cost constraints, UNSW is focused on breaking
down barriers between faculties and disciplines, providing a more consistent level of service
delivery. The university’s complex IT infrastructure and siloed approach to service
management was not only impeding this goal through poor IT performance, but also
resulted in unnecessarily high costs.
Solution
UNSW has established a shared IT service centre, which uses a number of CA solutions,
including CA Service Desk Manager, CA IT Client Manager and CA Service Catalog, merging
siloed support groups and disparate technologies. As a result, the university has been able
to integrate and automate core support processes, such as incident management across the
university, as well as enable self-service for users.
Benefit
UNSW has been able to increase the efficiency of its IT department and eliminate duplication.
This has led to significant cost savings, and enabled the university to enhance IT performance,
thereby improving user satisfaction and reducing risk. This will provide the university with
sound foundations for its strategic ambitions.
“There was a loss of
confidence on the part of the
business — a perception that
things were going wrong and
IT weren’t able to deliver.”
Jeanette Patamia
IT Customer Services
Director, UNSW
Business Overview
A world-leading university
The University of New South Wales (UNSW), a leading Australian research and teaching
university, celebrated its sixtieth year in 2009. UNSW’s aspiration is to become the leading
research intensive university in the Asia Pacific region, with a particular focus on contemporary
and social issues.
Its Blueprint to Beyond (‘B2B’) strategy aims to achieve that aspiration by breaking down
barriers between the various faculties and disciplines, as well as between ‘blue sky’ research and
research that has a more immediate impact.
UNSW believes this approach will help it become:
•One of the top three research universities in Australia
•The destination of choice for students with the highest potential
•A valued partner to its key communities.
UNSW already scores highly in a range of national and international rankings, including being
ranked first in Australia by the UK Times Higher Education Supplement in 2008 for its Faculty of
Engineering and first out of over a thousand institutions worldwide by the international journal
Accounting and Finance in 2007.
The university’s principal site is at Kensington, near Sydney, although it has additional campuses
at Paddington, Canberra, Randwick and Coogee, as well as research stations around New
South Wales.
Challenge
The costs of complexity
Breaking down barriers means improving internal and external collaboration — something that
UNSW’s very complex IT infrastructure was making difficult.
Before its change programme, UNSW’s server environment was ageing, with many applications
residing on out of date or unsupported hardware. The servers ran a wide variety of operating
platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, Macintosh and Linux.
At the user level the IT landscape was similarly complex. UNSW’s IT department supports
around 6,500 staff laptops/desktops as well as student laptops. It also provides email services
to all staff and students — with student email hosted via Microsoft Labs — and equips and
maintains specialised laboratory equipment.
Even understanding the assets it owned was a challenge for UNSW. While central IT historically
supported enterprise applications and the network, there was lots of local support function
duplication across the faculties, with IT functions in each faculty looking after their own areas.
That meant, for example, that asset management relied upon disparate spreadsheets owned by
different departments across the university.
“We needed to implement a
strategy that could cater for
increasing demand without
an automatic need to increase
front line support staff and
operational costs.”
Jeanette Patamia
IT Customer Services
Director, UNSW
Maintaining service levels for thousands of users
This complexity and duplication, together with a lack of effective IT service management tools,
resulted in unnecessary costs as well as poor overall IT performance. As Jeanette Patamia,
UNSW’s IT Customer Services Director, explains, “We had 34 email systems, seven helpdesk
systems, and many people doing the same thing in different departments, but not really talking
to each other. It was a siloed approach, which led to loss of confidence on the part of the
business — a perception that things were going wrong and IT weren’t able to deliver.”
The result was that IT incidents were often not addressed before they became problems. This
led to a risk that staff and students would be unable to access critical information, or share
important knowledge with faculty staff and peers.
In order to provide a standardised service and infrastructure across the university, UNSW
decided to embark upon a major IT change programme. Since the start of the programme,
around 400 application servers have been replaced.
The aim of the change programme was to:
• Create a single shared IT services organisation
•Introduce more effective ways of working
•Improve service performance, with costs and service levels measured and managed
•Enhance communication across the faculties, removing the organisational silos.
To meet these goals, UNSW needed a dependable IT incident and problem management
solution and a more integrated approach to service management.
Solution
Enabling a single shared service centre
To improve the quality, business alignment and scalability of IT services, UNSW’s approach was
based on implementing a single IT service centre and a single service centre tool across the
university. After issuing a general tender for potential partners and service management
solutions, UNSW identified CA Service Desk Manager with CA IT Client Manager as the best
match to its needs.
“We needed to implement a strategy that could cater for increasing demand without an
automatic need to increase front line support staff and operational costs,” comments Patamia.
“CA provided the tools we needed to do that. A key benefit is the self-service mechanism, but
overall we felt the tool suite would enable us to maintain customer satisfaction, contain costs
and protect against security threats.”
The involvement of CA Services and CA Education was key to the successful rollout of
the solutions, which started in August 2008. As part of the deployment, CA Education
provided more than 50 training courses for administrators and analysts. This helped ensure
knowledge transfer on the new CA solutions, enabling UNSW to minimise future vendor
support requirements.
“The self-service and
automated approach is
working fabulously. Problem
types are being identified and
routed to the appropriate
resolver without even touching
the shared service centre.”
Jeanette Patamia
IT Customer Services
Director, UNSW
“Of course CA provided a suite of products that met our business requirements, but a
partnership is far more than making a purchase,” comments Patamia. “It means we have the
same vision, we have shared or common goals, and we want success for each other. It’s an
ongoing relationship, where both partners work collaboratively towards a common goal.”
UNSW used CA Productivity Accelerator to create some online guides and help for basic use
of key areas of CA Service Desk Manager, which are broken down into common tasks to help
reinforce standardised processes. These include the procedure for ticket creation, processing and
resolution, change order creation and processing, as well as knowledge creation and publishing.
Patamia comments, “Using CAPA we are able to provide real-time self help analyst guidance
to utilise features and increase analysts’ skill sets. It integrates with the service desk to provide
visual training to users on-demand, in the context of the task and process that they are working
on. This helps to speed time-to-value, lower training costs, improve adherence to best practices
and preserve institutional knowledge.”
Minimising IT workload through automation and remote services
CA Service Desk Manager’s request, incident, problem and change management capabilities are
designed to maximise productivity and responsiveness. ITIL compatible and built on a proven,
scalable architecture, CA Service Desk Manager aligns IT processes with business goals using
workflow-driven automation and self-service capabilities. The university has also deployed
CA SupportBridge™ and CA Service Catalog and is using CA Service Desk Manager’s integral
CMDB and knowledge tools to support its vision for an IT shared service centre.
Used in concert with CA Service Desk Manager, CA IT Client Manager supports asset
management and software delivery, helping UNSW to simplify and integrate the management
of end user devices. For example, when UNSW buys a new desktop, information on the asset is
captured in CA IT Client Manager’s Asset Management module and then fed to the CA Service
Desk Manager CMDB. This information is readily availably to the shared service centre team
and aids both change and problem management.
UNSW is currently reviewing IT Client Manager’s Remote Control tool for use across the
desktop environment at its main campus. As Patamia explains, “Enabling the service desk to
fix problems remotely will reduce the volume of user requests that require deskside visits and
increase the first call fix rate. Not only will this enhance user satisfaction, but also help to free
up our senior analysts for more technical activities.”
Self-service capabilities for faster problem resolution
Although CA Service Desk Manager is primarily used by UNSW’s front line support staff to
manage around 10,000 tickets per month — of which 9,000 are requests and 1,000 incidents —
some of the university’s faculties are also using the solution via the CA Service Catalog front-end.
For example, the self-service capabilities were recently rolled out to UNSW’s Australia School of
Business. As Patamia explains, “The self-service and automated approach is working fabulously.
Problem types are being identified and routed to the appropriate resolver without even touching
the shared service centre, which has a significant impact on costs and resolution times.”
Resolution times have also been improved through UNSW’s use of CA Knowledge Tools, which
captures valuable problem-solving experience and publishes it for reuse. “We see over 1,200
“The goal is for students
and staff to experience
fewer IT problems, resulting
in less downtime.”
Jeanette Patamia
IT Customer Services
Director, UNSW
hits a month to the 378 knowledge documents we’ve published so far, and we’re adding to these
all the time,” says Patamia.
Benefit
Lower cost, less duplication, improved service
By implementing CA solutions and consolidating IT services, UNSW has been able to eliminate
duplication, resulting in significant cost savings.
The university’s new approach to IT service delivery has also enabled the IT department to
achieve improvements in performance. These include:
• 93 percent of the central monthly targets are being achieved compared with less than 80
percent previously
• 64 percent of user queries are resolved on the first call.
Thanks to improved call categorisation, the IT team can also prioritise its resources and
response based on business need. As Patamia explains, “By breaking down how calls are logged
— whether by phone, fax or email — we quickly identified that at least 100 email requests per
day could be pushed off to a self-logging mechanism, freeing up service desk analysts to answer
phone-related enquiries. It sounds like a no-brainer, but without it we would still be manually
logging 2,000 calls per month!”
That kind of manual intervention is a luxury UNSW can’t afford if it is to keep pace with rising
demand for IT services. “We needed a system that could see us into the future. Today we are
already taking around 10,000 requests per month through the service centre tool set and we
know that demand will grow.”
As well as helping UNSW address its initial service management goals, the CA solutions have:
•Improved user satisfaction and service levels
•Enhanced IT measurement and reporting
• Mitigated risk and improved security
•Established a cost-effective platform for continuous improvement.
“The goal is for students and staff to experience fewer IT problems, resulting in less downtime
and better collaboration,” comments Patamia. “We now have the IT base on which to deliver the
full benefits of the IT change programme, and support the university’s strategy to make UNSW
one of the leading education institutions in the Asia Pacific region.”
To learn more and see how CA software solutions enable other organizations to unify and
simplify IT management for better business results, visit ca.com/success.
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