Industry :
Education
Location :
US
Challenges:
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Legacy platforms
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Lack of end-user adoption
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Visibility and ownership of service requests
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Scalability
About Eastern Washington University
Eastern Washington University (EWU) is a comprehensive regional public university in Cheney, Washington, with programs offered at campuses in Cheney, Spokane, and multiple campus locations throughout the state of Washington.
Founded in 1882, the university is academically divided into six colleges: The College of Arts, Letters, and Education; The College of Business; The College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics; The College of Social Sciences; The College of Health Science and Public Health; and University College.
With a total enrollment of 12,633 students spread across its campuses and online, the IT team at EWU is tasked with ensuring the on-time availability of technological facilities and services across all the campuses.
Modernize and Scale IT - The move from on-premise to cloud
To modernize the campus IT services at EWU, the IT team began its search for a cloud-based ITSM solution. The objective was to improve agent and end-user adoption as well as extend the solution instance across campus partners, departments, and other offices. From a functionality standpoint, EWU was also looking to expand beyond help desk operations to include - Change Management, Problem Management, Asset Management, Self Service, and Knowledge Base.
The IT team at EWU was looking for a solution that would provide agility, zero maintenance and overhead challenges, and easy to deploy with out of the box integration with other in-house applications. EWU shortlisted solutions from TeamDynamix, ServiceDesk Plus, JIRA Service Desk, SysAid, Zendesk, and Freshservice to replace their incumbent on-prem SolarWinds and ServiceNow solutions.
The Solution and Progress
After thorough due diligence, EWU decided to enroll Freshservice, Freshworks' ITSM suite, to modernize the campus IT services. While using Freshservice, the IT team at EWU has been able to accrue value within week one of implementation. The user adoption has improved drastically, with 50,000+ requesters currently using it. There has been an uptake in the self-service portal powered by robust knowledge management and service catalog capabilities. This, coupled with the ticket deflection functionality, has resulted in more time at the hands of the agents to focus on critical tasks. Freshservice implementation and usage have resulted in improved ticket visibility (context and status) and agent ratings. Additionally, the IT team at EWU has replaced spreadsheets to track IT assets by leveraging the integration with Freshservice, JAMF, and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager.
“We extensively use rules and workflow automation, and those have been great. I think that differentiates Freshservice and makes it easy for us to respond and implement things quickly versus when we were attempting to use ServiceNow,” said Brad Christ, Associate Vice President for IT and Chief Information Officer at EWU.
Transition to a future-ready, always-on digital campus
The IT team at EWU leverages the dashboard and analytics within Freshservice to monitor SLAs and the different stages of incident and service requests. This has helped the team to streamline processes, increase accountability, and transparency. With ease-of-use, excellent support, and low total cost of ownership, EWU plans to leverage the solution for other departments. "With a growing IT services workload, maintaining records and increasing accountability is critical. With Freshservice, we look forward to achieving just that," says Brad Christ, Associate Vice President for IT and Chief Information Officer at EWU.
“With a growing IT services workload, maintaining records and increasing accountability is critical. With Freshservice, we look forward to achieving just that.”
