University of Pretoria

Streamlining support for 132,000 using eight service agents

Though universities in South Africa are particularly resource-constrained, UP made an early decision to prioritize an investment in IT service management (ITSM); a decision that has paid dividends over the years. When Charl Joubert, change and configuration manager joined UP, he inherited a service desk and incident management solution. Through his association with ITIL, Joubert became a certified ITIL master and drove streamlined processes for the university in his capacity in ITS (Information Technology Services). “Through our longstanding partnership with OpenText we evolved our service model. Our first priority was to introduce a change management module, so we were delighted when OpenText announced this. As new modules became available, we opted in and OpenText SMAX was launched just at the right time for us.” UP implemented the full stack of modules and were able to consolidate stand-alone solutions into SMAX, saving license and maintenance costs.

SMAX’s embedded machine learning and process automation capabilities enable UP to support 132,000 end users (including current students, alumni, and study applicants) with just eight dedicated service agents. “Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) were the driving force to include our student helpdesk in the SMAX architecture,” said Joubert. “Students had been served with a separate tool and the ITSM team only directly supported our faculty staff and post-grad students, with six dedicated agents, delivering a higher touch support model. The value of machine learning is phenomenal in our student community, as evidenced by the wide use of our virtual agents and knowledge articles within SMAX. Without machine learning and AI there is absolutely no way we could support our end users with the few dedicated agents we have.” Over the years, UP evaluated other OpenText™ IT Operations Management solutions carefully and, if found to be of value, introduced them into the existing architecture. OpenText™ Operations Orchestration (OO) started the whole journey of process automation. Today, OO enables all types of IT operation needs— from password resets to VPN access and student laptop sourcing. OpenText™ Universal CMDB assisted service modeling and visualization builds a complete understanding of how the UP infrastructure delivers business and IT services, helping resolve issues faster and avoid service downtime. UP currently has 1,800 Universal CMDB licenses and looks to increase this to cover 2,400 servers.

Rapidly educating users forced by COVID-19 to work remotely

The combination of SMAX and OO delivered tangible value during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. The university, like businesses around the world, quickly had to pivot to a remote working and learning environment for its staff and students. The first priority was to provide VPN access to everyone who needed this. “We saw our VPN requests increase 11-fold and thanks to SMAX and OO we defined, reviewed, published, and automated the VPN provisioning process within hours,” commented Joubert. “Users are granted VPN access in a few seconds, as soon as the request is approved.” The OpenText™ Adoption Readiness Tool (ART) played a key role here. Joubert was quickly able to provide a step-by-step and ‘try me’ simulation-based tutorial on how to install and use VPN as well as many other service offerings. This was placed into SMAX as a knowledge article and the OO-driven VPN provisioning process directed users to it. ART has replaced internal IT training and is fully integrated with the university’s learning management system (LMS). Joubert comments: “The ART ‘show me, try me, and test me’ learning modules have proved very successful for us. Eliminating one-to-one training saves approximately three months every year, our training is rolled out in three languages as part of our onboarding process, and our LMS gives us the metrics to track user adoption.”

Automating processes to address VPN and laptop provisioning

COVID-19 is a formidable and unprecedented challenge for anyone, but especially universities where the migration to emergency remote learning has sharpened existing socioeconomic fault lines in society. Many universities struggled with this transition. This was mainly due to inadequate IT infrastructures, limited expertise for online teaching and learning methods, and the inability to provide computers and data to students. Joubert was clear that having an enterprise service management architecture in place was a major help, “SMAX frankly saved the day when COVID-19 hit. The supporting structures for remote service delivery were quickly put in place and we SMAX-onboarded facilities, security, and student administration departments to support students who needed travel permits, data to access remote learning services, or even daily necessities to their accommodation as they were not allowed to travel back home. Our SMAX architecture tackled it all efficiently and effectively.” Providing seamless VPN access was a good start in the COVID-19 crisis, but the university also had to support students who did not have laptops or devices that were conducive to distance learning. The South African government quickly put grants in place for universities to supply laptops to students in need. The UP IT team called upon SMAX and OO again, and included OO’s robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities. Creating a ‘shopping’ site that was directly linked to a courier service, they integrated SMAX, OO, and RPA capabilities to automate the process of ordering up to 400 laptops a day. The laptop vendors leveraged these capabilities to receive and send order information and arrange courier collection, with delivery straight to students’ accommodations. The courier’s proof of delivery was imported into SMAX’s asset management module, allowing the team to track exactly what device went to which student. Joubert was delighted, “This seamless process meant that many disadvantaged students with no means of accessing remote learning were up and running with a new laptop within just a couple of weeks. The process operated like clockwork.” Students can also apply for a data bundle if they do not have adequate connectivity—the cost of the bundle is covered by the university. Students navigate to the SMAX portal, locate the “data bundle” tile, and enter details that include the mobile service operator and the mobile number on which the data bundle will be loaded. OO transforms this information and sends it to the respective mobile operators.