Transforming educational support with ServiceNow

Finland’s University of Jyväskylä is ranked among the top three percent worldwide and its naturally beautiful campus is home to a dynamic multidisciplinary research university – an open and collaborative community of almost 2,600 experts and 14,700 students. The university’s vision is to be a global leader in the study of learning, wellbeing, and basic natural phenomena, reshaping competence to build a sustainable society.

The University of Jyväskylä serves around 14,700 students and over 2,600 faculty and administrative staff every year. Technology plays a key role in enabling them all to learn, teach, and manage effectively. However, the open source ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) tool the university was reliant on was reaching end of life and was limited in how it processed and resolved the thousands of tickets generated every month. The university could not provide proactive services as service agents were fulfilling repetitive low priority tasks.
 
The university wanted to find a more extensible service desk platform that could scale with its digital transformation goals and introduce additional functionality, such as AI natural language processing. The university issued an RFP with 200 requirements in order to find the right product and partner to deploy, manage, and support its service management solution. As a result, Fujitsu and ServiceNow were selected.

“Our database was over-extended and the existing tool only served the IT department, so HR and finance were using outdated and inefficient approaches, which led to requests going missing and duplication of effort,” explains Ari Hirvonen, Chief Digital Officer at the University of Jyväskylä. “ServiceNow offered the comprehensive tools we were looking for and, through a competitive bidding process, we evaluated potential implementation partners. Fujitsu was selected based on its local presence, and ServiceNow expertise and experience.”

Over the course of six months, using an Agile Sprint methodology, Fujitsu migrated the IT department onto ServiceNow, followed by a phased rollout to administrative teams, including HR and finance, across the campus.

Fujitsu built a self-service portal and detailed knowledge base, empowering users to quickly and easily resolve their own issues without having to request assistance. This will help drive down the 5,500 tickets generated every month by automating common requests so service desk agents can focus on high priority activities, while providing a better user experience.

“Fujitsu’s team took the time to understand our desired outcomes and objectives, and was able to smoothly deploy a ServiceNow environment that supports our whole organization,” adds Hirvonen. “The team continues to support us to maintain, develop, and manage our platform so it is always fit for purpose.”

The university now enjoys accelerated service processes, enabling it to resolve incidents quickly and efficiently. Users can access the self-service portal and find answers to common challenges instantly. That makes for happier, more productive staff and students.

ServiceNow and Fujitsu played a key role in helping the university transition during the COVID-19 pandemic when remote working became mandatory. The technical challenges of remote learning and teaching caused a spike in demand for IT support, which was easier to manage through ServiceNow.

“During the pandemic, everything happened so fast, we didn’t have time to analyze the situation so having the ServiceNow platform in place proved critical in maintaining continuity for our users,” concludes Hirvonen. “Fujitsu’s implementation of our ServiceNow platform ensured we could securely and effectively meet the increase in demand and, looking forward, I’m excited to see this partnership continuing to flourish.”