From the West to a New Frontier - Abilene Takes IT Service to New Levels

Abilene Christian University, a small private institution located in Texas, is using TeamDynamix IT service management (ITSM) to improve service delivery to their 5,000 students and 1,000 faculty and staff that work on campus.

At Abilene, their IT organization consists of 35 full-time employees and 55 student employees. Their frontline IT support is primarily made up of student employees, “Those students serve as the frontline for our IT organization,” Eric Lemmons, help desk manager, said. “All tickets come through them before they are passed on to the next level of support.”

Prior to using TeamDynamix ITSM, the university used a homegrown system that was built by student employees before taking on a “life of its own” Lemmons said.

“One of the challenges that we had was that it wasn’t really developed any kind of ITIL best practices,” he said. “It made reporting a challenge. The only way we could get data out of the system was through a simple CSV dump – there was no way for us to really create dashboards or do any kind of higher-level reporting that would be really useful for us to improve our service.”

When searching for new IT service management software Lemmons said they prioritized finding a tool that supports an ITIL foundation, “We needed it to have change management, problem management and incident management. And we needed good knowledge management behind all of that.”

They also needed something that could easily provide reports to upper-level IT leadership, “They need to be able to easily access the dashboards and be able to see what’s happening within our organization,” Lemmons said.