Information Technology Service Management

The ITSM team is engaged in a large-scale initiative to optimize IT Service Management tools using ServiceNow. This project aims to deliver a comprehensive and collaborative approach to enterprise and localized IT service management. It involves input and analysis from diverse perspectives across campus, ensuring a holistic and inclusive process.  The goals of the ITSM Optimization Project are to provide comprehensive visibility and governance of all IT services, ensuring efficient delivery, and maintaining an authoritative record of IT services for the University of Arizona. There's a 50-minute video from the 2024 IT Summit available that shares more information about the project: https://arizona.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=580a07cf-ad87-4bea-b37e-b1c50140fef3 

12-30 Months Total:

• Phase 1 - Q2 2024 to Q3 2024: Phase one involves foundational analysis and assessment work. Phase one key tasks include finalizing the service continuity proposal, improving onboarding, a SACM analysis, metadata updates, and delivering ITSM metrics to Service Offering Managers to close out records older than 3 months. 
• Phase 2 - Q3 2024 - Q2 2025: Phase two will focus on collaborative efforts and tactical project development work in the ServiceNow platform.  Deliverables and objectives include an updated Service Catalog, ServiceNow Portal and UX improvements, continued onboarding of campus IT teams and service centers, and setting foundations for the Configuration Management Database.
• Phase 3 - Q3 2025 and beyond: Phase three work is largely informed by prior phases. It will include a Portal and Catalog Re-launch, CMDB updates, benchmark implementation, and performance analytics.

Project Leadership:

• Nikolas Hodge-Enterprise Architect and Interim Senior Director ITSM and IAM
• David Gerlach-Director, ITSM
• Audrey Ashcraft-ITSM Team Leader
• Cecilia Gunn-Project Manager

In partnership with:

• Clancey Dollard-Director, IT Support
• Leo Enfield-IT Manager, College of Engineering
• Peg Kearney-Director, IT Operations, College of Nursing
• Dan Mayhew-IT Director, Business Affairs Technology Services
• Kevin Milton-Leader, Self-Service & Training
• Mike Resnick-IT Director, Campus Health Services
• Ed Xia-Asst Dean, College of Medicine

Regular updates on the ITSM Optimization Project will be provided on this site. To learn more or to get involved, please email the team at optimize-itsm@list.arizona.edu. You can also join us at the ITSM Information Hours every other Friday at 9:05 a.m. https://arizona.zoom.us/j/84229604961

The Knowledge Base will grow and the metadata will be improved - getting users more quickly to answers and resolutions for their IT needs and questions.

Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) is the process of maintaining information (i.e., configurations) about IT Assets and Configuration Items (CIs) required to deliver an IT service, including their relationships.  A configuration management database (CMDB) is a centralized file that functions as a comprehensive data warehouse, organizing information about an IT environment. CMDB clarifies the relationships between hardware, software components, and networks for improved configuration management. Configuration Management Database is cloud-based single system of record for our IT infrastructure and digital service data. It works seamlessly with your ServiceNow applications, delivering value across the entire IT value stream—helping IT to diagnose service outages, evaluate the service impact of changes, manage your assets, improve compliance, and more. It’s designed to support dynamic virtualized and cloud environments to provide the real-time visibility into deployed infrastructure hardware and software. Example: If a network router fails, the CMDB application can inform of any hardware and services that are downstream of that router so that IT can provide alerts and updates to affected users during the outage.

Whereas IT Asset Management (ITAM) is out of scope for this project up through phase 3, the foundational work for CMDB could lead us to implementing an ITAM solution in the future.

ITAM is the process of accounting for assets during their lifecycle. This includes procurement and purchasing, software license management, technology refresh, and asset valuation. ITAM oversees more financial and contractual components of assets. CMDB is centered around the data used to manage assets during the period of time in which they are live and present within your IT environment. This includes understanding what comprises a service or asset, how it is used, and how it is related to other assets and services. 

It is anticipated that localized and departmental services will be organized into groupings similar to categories, following the IT Restructure project. The new structure aims to align services by their specialized needs and support structures, as well as the departmental units supported.

As a project outcome is to improve onboarding processes, and we are awaiting the impacts of the IT Restructure, the Service Management Team has slowed down its onboarding efforts to allow resources to focus on project outcomes. If your team has an immediate need for an ITSM solution, please do not hesitate to each out to us (UITS-ITSM@arizona.edu) and we'll work with you to accommodate your immediate needs.

It is the vision of UITS leadership to onboard all IT Support Groups and IT Services into ServiceNow following IT staff restructuring initiatives. There is a lot of added value to creating a unified experience for optimal IT coordination that will maximize the customer experience for all university employees and students. Some added benefits include:

• A global user experience for all
• Improved quality of service delivery, time to incident resolution, and less process friction for client IT requests
• Combined and comparable metrics across all IT
• ServiceNow is highly-configurable, adaptable, and flexible assuring a streamlined delivery of each unique IT service
• Improved collaboration between all IT support groups

An outcome of phase 3 is to implement benchmarks for service delivery and for IT incidents. The goal for SLAs is to allow Service Offering Managers and IT Leadership to measure their benchmarks against their individual service offerings, and not against other service offerings.

The project team is supporting a new pilot porgram to to improve Incident Management. The project has several goals to improve: times to incident assignments (support teams and supporting staff), time to resolution, customer transparency, and customer satisfaction. For more details, please contact the project team.

As a part of phase 1, we have made several improvements to the Search functionality.  We are doing this by improving the metadata tags associated with service offerings, knowledge articles, and service request forms. Search results are also going to be more succinct, and sorted in a logical order.  For those that wish to browse for service offerings, we are planning to implement many changes to the architecture of the Service Catalog following the Higher Education IT Service Catalog Model, which is a leading model used by many of our university peers. Lastly, phases 2 and 3 will also have us improving user experience to several areas of the ServiceNow platform, including the main Service Portal.

ITSM in ServiceNow is specifically modeled for IT service delivery and management of incidents and interactions for students and employees at The University of Arizona. If you have a need for case management or customer relationship manager outside of information technology, we recommend that you review the service offerings of Trellis: https://trellis.arizona.edu/

You can find our Service Portal here:  https://uarizona.service-now.com/sp

The ServiceNow content page in the Portal is located here: https://uarizona.service-now.com/sp?id=sc_cat_item&sys_id=41b82ef51b7d8d107947edf1604bcb4f

There's a video on how to use the Service Portal here: https://arizona.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=3fc68281-9d4b-4c62-a8c2-ad5e01225738

IT Professionals at the University of Arizona can also find end-user training here: https://uarizona.service-now.com/sp?id=kb_article_view&sys_kb_id=ed4fc35d1b6b0e94bdf95465624bcbc9

The Service Management Team also has open office hours every other Friday at 9:05am via Zoom: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/84229604961?from=addon and consultations via an appointment.