CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY The University of Verona Improves Service Efficiency with CA Service Desk Manager CLIENT PROFILE Business: The University of Verona Industry: Education Employees: 1,500 BUSINESS The University of Verona is one of Italy s leading universities. Founded in 1982, it has 24,000 students and is internationally recognised as a top academic institution. CHALLENGE To maintain its competitive advantage and keep up with modern trends, the university decided to expand its service management solutions by incorporating non-it help requests from staff and eliminating paper processes in student administration. SOLUTION CA Service Desk Manager was extended to cover the new processes. Non-IT services managed by the solution include building maintenance and management of student administration procedures soon to be available to all 24,000 students. BENEFIT Monitoring SLAs has improved non-it maintenance services. Queues at admin offices are shorter and student enquiries are processed with total transparency.
2 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: THE UNIVERSITY OF VERONA ca.com Business An internationally acclaimed university in the city of Romeo and Juliet With 24,000 students and a high profile reputation, the University of Verona is one of Italy s most important universities. In addition to playing a prominent role in the local community, its covers a large part of north-eastern Italy, with a network of 10 campuses. The institution employs 1,500 teaching and non-teaching staff, all devoted to innovation and maintaining high quality teaching and research. In just over 30 years the university founded in 1982 has developed a large catalogue of courses delivered by twelve departments, with 62 degree courses and 42 specialist schools. Its healthcare school is particularly diverse, with departments of medicine, neuroscience, surgical science, dentistry, gynecology, paediatrics, diagnostics and public health. Equally important are other courses covering a wide range of disciplines such as biotechnology, business management, computing, economics, languages and foreign literature, law, philosophy, psychology and history. The university has strong links with the local community and looks to continually strengthen the ties between its courses and business in the future. Despite its young age, the University of Verona is internationally recognised as a top academic institution. It ranked 66 th in The Times Higher Education 150 Under 50 Rankings in 2016 and 701 st in the QS World Universities ranking (201 st for medicine). It also came first in the 2015 ranking of Italian universities by Il Sole 24 Ore, the leading Italian financial daily newspaper. Challenge Meeting rising expectations The University of Verona has always placed great emphasis on the efficiency of its services to staff and students, so in 2009 it adopted CA Service Desk Manager to manage IT support for its 1,500 employees. We originally chose CA Service Desk Manager because its flexibility and customisation capabilities meant we could adapt it to our needs. Another important factor was its ability to integrate with the other CA Technologies solutions in our portfolio, recalls Giovanni Bianco, IT Officer University of Verona. Since its implementation the number of CA Service Desk Manager users has risen. The solution is exceptional at managing more than 5,000 IT help requests annually, resolving problems ranging from computer faults and crashed programmes to a weak Wi-Fi signal, comments Bianco. In recent years, the University of Verona realised it could extend the benefits of automated service management to a wider range of activities to keep up with advances in IT and trends in academia. In a world of social media people expect institutions to offer online services to save time, so the university needs to constantly modernise public administration to remain competitive, explains Bianco.
3 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: THE UNIVERSITY OF VERONA ca.com In 2014 the university decided to embark on two new projects to further enhance efficiency. The first was to expand the existing solution to cover IT support for employees by adding a variety of non-it help requests. The second was the dematerialisation of the student admin process. These two projects represented a real challenge because they involved extending automated solutions to a whole range of new services and a much bigger user base, while enabling the use of mobile devices, says Bianco. Solution Managing a range of non-it support services for staff and students Staff complaints over maintenance delays have fallen dramatically. Giovanni Bianco Head of IT, University of Verona The first challenge that the University of Verona had to face was choosing the best software to handle the new projects. Adopting the solution used for existing applications focusing only on IT support for staff was not immediately obvious. We had no experience of using CA Service Desk Manager to handle non-it services. But we believed the solution had the potential to meet our needs, so we decided to expand our use to cover this new requirement, explains Bianco. With help of a partner, the university scaled up CA Service Desk Manager s functionality to support the new demand. The customisation required was quite limited, because the latest release of the solution already had an integrated mobile interface, and the adaptation to a larger user base did not require additional IT resources. The new service for university staff includes maintenance requests for classroom audio and video equipment, air-conditioning systems and electricity, and around 5,000 devices are supported by the service. Support requests are forwarded automatically via CA Service Desk Manager to an external maintenance provider. Staff can also use the application to access statistical data, and make enquiries about taxation or career matters, for example. The second project, making student admin paper-free, was completed in several phases. Initially the service only included the vertical services provided by the admin offices for each teaching area, such as paying fees, requesting academic records and grades, or course details. To begin with these services were made available through mobile devices to the 6,000 students in the economics and law departments. We tested the system on a quarter of the students and the feedback was extremely positive, so much so that students in other disciplines also asked to use the service, says Bianco. In the second phase, the total number of students using the automated services rose to 10,000. The university is currently planning a third stage to broaden the scope of the service to cover horizontal services that apply across all teaching areas, such as admissions (requests for scholarships and grants). Once this is active, online services will be available to all 24,000 students.
4 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: THE UNIVERSITY OF VERONA ca.com Benefit Greater efficiency and transparency Queues at student administration are now practically a thing of the past. Valerio Paiusco Help Desk Manager, University of Verona The adoption of CA Service Desk Manager for both projects is delivering huge benefits to the university. The benefits for non-it requests from staff include better overall management of the whole process, as Bianco explains: CA Service Desk Manager gives every step in the process an incontrovertible time stamp showing when a help request is sent, when the service provider takes charge, and when the problem is solved. This avoids disputes and allows us to monitor compliance with service provider SLAs. As a result, staff complaints over maintenance delays have fallen dramatically. Taking student admin paper-free is also proving extremely valuable. Queues at student administration are now practically a thing of the past, says Valerio Paiusco, Help Desk Manager at the University of Verona. We have reduced office opening hours from five to four days a week, allowing us to devote more resources to back office work. The online self-help services are also reducing pressure on other contact channels used by students, such as telephone and email. A unique feature of our implementation is that the students can now monitor the progress of their request, and see the name of the individual who is handling their enquiry, added Bianco. This guarantees full transparency, a significant step forward in public administration. To provide even more transparency the university intends to publish average problem solution time on its website for various categories of requests. To do this we need a simplified and exportable dashboard, so the excellent reporting and dashboard creation functionality in the latest release of CA Service Desk Manager will be very useful, explains Bianco. Both projects exploit CA Service Desk Manager s analytical capabilities. It doesn t just automate help requests, says Bianco. The analysis functions enable us to monitor our performance and assign extra resources where needed if necessary. Expanding the use of CA Service Desk Manager to non-it projects has enabled the University of Verona to: Reduce IT and administrative costs Improve quality of service to employees and students Increase competitive advantage and enhance its reputation Gain greater control over service providers. Seven years after our initial deployment, CA Service Desk Manager has proved that it is still the best solution for service management, and sufficiently flexible to adapt to a broad range of new applications, concludes Bianco.
5 CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: THE UNIVERSITY OF VERONA Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com. Copyright 2017 CA, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document does not contain any warranties and is provided for informational purposes only. Any functionality descriptions may be unique to the customers depicted herein and actual product performance may vary. 200-269752-0417