Ultra-responsive, always available support is seen as ‘bog standard’ service for the incoming generation of workers.

Mark Flexman, service planning manager for Bournemouth University, told ServiceDesk360 that consumerisation has led to a massive leap in technology expectations, with 17,000 students asking for support late into the evening for a range of devices and issues.  “You must understand the working habits of students who grew up using computers, their base knowledge is so much higher now and what we think of as premium service is now bog-standard.”

However, service desks smart enough to adapt to the growing self-service culture can free up resources to focus on IT support challenges such as BYOD and mobile support.  “When we launched our ServiceNow knowledge tool, we had 12,000 views in the first month.  Students want to help themselves where possible.”

The use of IT support technologies ServiceNow has been crucial for allowing Bournemouth University to accommodate the ever growing demand for IT services.  “IT is clearly becoming more complex and to keep up you have to work smarter.  Yes, the number of IT staff has increased tenfold since I joined, but the University is 20 times bigger.  Since installing ServiceNow, we’ve seen dramatic changes.  We understand causes of problems better, we can see our top (service) requests and change management is fully integrated so we can see what services are affected and who we need to inform.  We don’t need to swap between systems, everything is integrated so if we change a field, it changes everywhere.  I was surprised how quickly the service desk staff embraced it in testing, they wanted us to switch across immediately.”

BYOD has been an unavoidable challenge for the University in recent years, with students asking for games consoles, laptops and smart devices to be added to the infrastructure, but Flexman says the solution is relatively simple.  “You just need to provide a secure environment, we have a student VLAN so we’ve effectively put a wrap around the service,” concludes Flexman.