Case Study: SUNY Brockport
February 15, 2021
With the help of TeamDynamix, SUNY Brockport was able to quickly transform its IT practice and improve customer delivery during the pandemic.
Having the right tools to support IT service management can make a big difference. Elon University, a mid-sized private university in North Carolina, learned this lesson firsthand. Elon was challenged with systems that could not flex easily to meet ITSM processes. What’s more, changes to these platforms took time and effort. This ultimately drove Elon back out to market for a better fit.
Patrick Donohue, Assistant CIO and Director of Campus Technology Support, knew of TeamDynamix from peer institutions. “Its share of the market in higher education got our attention,” he says. “We found that the company aligned well with our processes and approach to work.
Elon implemented TeamDynamix in spring 2019 and has realized numerous benefits in doing so. For instance, this cloud-based platform has helped the IT service team automate many processes that were done manually before with flexible and easily customizable forms and workflows. It has also driven user self-service with better knowledge management practices and an intuitive customer-facing interface.
Both enhancements have saved IT employees time, while improving the user experience for students, faculty and staff alike.
Easy Rollout: Service Portal, Knowledge Base, Service Catalog & Automation
Before implementing TeamDynamix, Elon University didn’t have an IT service catalog, and its knowledge base consisted of a publicly available wiki. To initiate a service request, users would have to call or email the IT support team.
TeamDynamix made it easy – it was easy to spin up a knowledge base and portal; it was easy to hook up the service request catalog; and it was easy to build out the automation and workflows to streamline the process. The transformation was completed quickly, and now users have the option to submit their requests through an online service portal hosted within the TeamDynamix platform.
“We have configured ways to route service requests directly to the team that’s responsible for resolving them, based on the answers to questions in the service forms,” says Brooke Spires, Service Design Analyst. “By bypassing the first point of contact, we’re cutting down on the time it takes to resolve tickets.”
This service portal also contains the university’s knowledge base articles, which have been imported from the wiki — and this enables IT staff to create simple workflows for creating, reviewing, and updating articles on a regular basis, improving the accuracy of the information.
Crowd Sourcing Knowledge Updates
“Before, it was cumbersome to update knowledge articles,” Donohue says. Now, when a technician creates an article describing the steps that he or she has taken in resolving a problem, a knowledge expert is alerted automatically to review and approve the article for publication. Users can rate the effectiveness of articles in helping them resolve their own IT issues, and knowledge experts are notified after a certain period to time to review articles again to make sure the information is still relevant and up to date.
“When people use our knowledge base now, they can be confident that they’re getting accurate information. That’s critical,” Donohue says.
Not only that, but it’s much easier for users to find the information they’re looking for, “Before, people would get frustrated when they couldn’t easily find what they needed,” Spires says. “Now, we can format and tag articles more effectively to improve their searchability.”
With the help of TeamDynamix, SUNY Brockport was able to quickly transform its IT practice and improve customer delivery during the pandemic.
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