NIE Turns to ServiceNow to Underpin Virtual Campus Model

NIE Turns to ServiceNow to
Underpin Virtual Campus Model

The National
Institute of Education (NIE) is a teacher training institution in Singapore
operating under the auspices of Nanyang Technological University. The NIE has
about 350 academic staff members, 4,175 students enrolled in undergraduate,
higher degree and leadership programs and a further 13,600 students undertaking
professional development programs. The institution also hosts the Office of
Education Research to run programs that advance education research, development
and innovation. About 33,000 teachers have trained at NIE, and the institution
has pledged to continue working to deliver world-class teacher education and
educational research.

NIE
had developed an in-house product to manag

In
line with this review, NIE’s Academic Computing & Information Services team—
including experts in ITIL, system design and the lean thinking business
methodology—started evaluating vendor IT service management products. “Our
primary goal was to deploy service management software that was user-friendly,
could be easily customised and integrated into our IT environment, and could
ultimately enable us to serve our teachers and students better,” Mr Tan Hoon
Chiang, Chief Information Officer, NIE, says. NIE acquired ServiceNow in July
2015.

Bringing
discipline to incident and service request processes: NIE started implementing ServiceNow on 5 August 2015 and conducted
user acceptance testing from December 2015. The software was used in production
from January 2016 and NIE’s service desk team and engineers had been using it
since. The institution launched a self-service portal on its mobile app to
staff on 1 June 2016 and to students on 8 August 2016. “We are endeavouring to
achieve a more disciplined approach to how we approach a range of service
management activities,” Mr Tan says. “We now offer a self-service portal, a service
catalogue, incident management, knowledge management, feedback management and
live chat. Services in our immediate pipeline include problem management,
change management, release and deployment management and expanding our service
catalogue to include back-office processes.”

Establish an end to end view and set benchmarks:
The software has enabled the NIE to obtain an end-to-end view of IT service
performance across the institution. The institution has now established
benchmarks from which to improve its resolution of up to 15,000 incidents per
year.

Traditionally,
staff and students had called in or used email to contact the desk in order to
resolve problems. The NIE has set itself two targets with the launch of its
self-service portal; reducing the use of traditional touchpoints such as
call-in or walk- in cases by 20 percent and increasing its first time
resolution rate to meet its target of 90 percent. Students and staff will also
soon be able to access a full service catalogue, while the institution is in
the exploratory stage of establishing library support processes.

Service management part of virtual campus model:
The service management
project is part of the NIE’s broader strategy to adopt a virtual campus model
delivering online learning services to students regardless of location. “We
expect to enable students and other stakeholders to report incidents and issues
with digital services to when they are delivered to them online,” Mr Tan says. “So,
using ServiceNow, we will be able to support our virtual as well as physical
users.”

He
describes the relationship between NIE and ServiceNow as a partnership rather
than just a traditional supplier. “My expectation is that ServiceNow will not
just be a vendor for NIE, but a partner to help us move forward and expand our
capabilities,” he says.