A unified platform for

better staff and student

experiences
88% 91% 1
’good’ satisfaction rating of incidents resolved single platform to manage
on resolved incidents within SLA Digital and HR services

Industry:
With ServiceNow as a unified Education

platform for Digital and People Location:

Christchurch, New Zealand
and Culture services, we can People:

deliver better user experiences. >5,000 employees

Products:
Michael Oulsnam, Chief Digital Officer, University of Canterbury • IT Service Management
• IT Operations Management

Delivering unified experiences to staff and students • HR Service Delivery

University of Canterbury (Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha) is New Zealand’s

second-oldest university. It is ranked in the top 2% of universities globally and
has a five-star Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) rating for its research and teaching.
With 150 years of experience in the higher education sector, the University of
Canterbury (UC) delivers a high standard of educational programs and innovative
research for the benefit of local and global communities.
 Its vision is to offer accessible, flexible, and future-focused education and provide
a personalized and connected experience for both staff and students.
With multiple, disparate systems and processes for digital requests, it was proving
difficult to deliver consistent services to staff and students. Many requests were sent
via email, or even paper forms, and when an incident was raised, there was the
potential that it could disappear or remain unseen for months. UC needed a modern,
unified service management platform with problem-management capability and
visibility into SLAs, such as data fulfillment times. The purpose was to enable the
University to improve service delivery and support future growth.
“The old system wasn’t loved by users,” says Michael Oulsnam, Chief Digital Officer
at the University of Canterbury. “Many requests were not recorded as staff and
students would either email requests directly or simply walk into an office and ask
for assistance.”

ServiceNow is a single place for staff and students

to engage across Digital and HR services, making
it easier for us to manage requests for our users.
Michael Oulsnam, Chief Digital Officer, University of Canterbury

Driving excellence in service operations

Over the past nine years, UC has used a traditional ticketing system for IT service
requests. This wasn’t well integrated with the broader ecosystem and failed to
provide the comprehensive service management capabilities that the Digital
Services team needed to ensure consistent and efficient support.
After a rigorous procurement process, ServiceNow was chosen as a strategic
platform for enterprise service management.
Within ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM), employees and students can
now easily raise or track service requests, such as password resets or software
procurement, with minimal friction via a single service portal.
“ServiceNow isn’t a place where requests go to die,” Michael says. “Requests have
to be actioned and maintained, and we have the data to ensure this happens.”
Ensuring service availability is critical for teaching and learning. With the successful
uplift of ITSM capabilities with ServiceNow, UC has since adopted ServiceNow IT
Operations Management (ITOM). The goal is to improve response times for system
outages and minimize the impact on delivering services such as upgrades to staff
and students.

UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY
By using ServiceNow ITOM Discovery, UC is now collecting data on its systems
to build its ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB). A future
phase is to create alerts for events and share them with the service desk to improve With the ServiceNow
response times. platform, we now have
“With the ServiceNow platform, we now have the insight to better manage SLAs the insight to better
and support continuous improvement. For example, we’ve seen 91% of incidents
manage SLAs and
resolved within SLA,” Michael explains. “Also, 100% of changes are now mandated
to be managed and communicated via the Change Advisory Board. We aim to support continuous
ensure the least possible disruption to services to maximize productivity.” improvement.
Michael Oulsnam
Unifying Digital and People and Culture experience Chief Digital Officer
Following the implementation of ServiceNow ITSM and ServiceNow ITOM within University of Canterbury

the Digital team, UC has consolidated more than 10 People and Culture forms
into ServiceNow HR Service Delivery, with more forms planned to be moved
across in the future.

Staff can now easily log a request to update bank account details, make payroll
donations, or update personal details via ServiceNow. This enables the People
and Culture team to quickly track and respond to these requests.

With support from ServiceNow Partner EY New Zealand, UC took an agile

approach to deploy ServiceNow HR Service Delivery in stages. Rather than defining
requirements and waiting for months to see a new system, the University worked
closely with the partner and its HR team to consolidate the first 10 processes
and forms.

Harnessing the power of one platform

UC went live with ServiceNow ITSM in just five months and implemented the
HR Service Delivery implementation six months later. UC now plans to expand
its capability to ServiceNow IT Asset Management (ITAM) to complement the
ongoing ServiceNow ITOM and CMDB work.

UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY
Overall, implementing a modern digital tool at the University is paying off,
delivering improved experiences and levels of efficiency for both staff and
students. A unified platform provides a better user experience across
100% of changes
the University.
are to be managed and
“ServiceNow is a single place for staff and students to engage across Digital
communicated via the CAB
and People and Culture services, making it easier for our teams to manage
and action requests for our users,” Michael says. “This has been reflected in
an 88% ‘good’ satisfaction rating on resolved incidents.”

>10
HR forms consolidated into
a single platform

© 2023 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc.
in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
SN_CaseStudy_UniversityofCanterbury_SEP_2023

servicenow.com