Customized Software Solutions Help Universities Meet Institutional Goals

How Universities Are Putting Platforms to Work

The University of Notre Dame first tapped ServiceNow for its most traditional use case: IT service management. But the implementations have expanded over the years. The security operations team now uses the platform to support security incident response and vulnerability response. “That’s tied to Configuration Management Database data” using ServiceNow audit capabilities, O’Brien says.

On the HR side, “we’ve got over a hundred HR services, and employees have multiple journeys, including onboarding and retirement,” he says. The platform supports all of those workflows, and the school also manages its governance, compliance and risk workflows through ServiceNow.

The journey continues, O’Brien says.

“We’re doing a huge project to secure all of our endpoints, the laptops and desktops,” he says, and ServiceNow Discovery will play a key role.

WATCH: See how else the University of Notre Dame is using ServiceNow.

Meanwhile, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Vice President for Digital Transformation and CIO Kivanc Oner was facing unwieldly tool sprawl.

“One of the core challenges on campus was the complexity of having so many decentralized offices across campus, each using their own different tools,” he says. “We needed platform-level solutions so we weren’t reinventing the wheel every time a new business need came up.”

Oner put Salesforce customer relationship management tools to work first in support of the student lifecycle.

“From prospecting and recruitment to admissions and enrollment, we built our student recruitment funnel directly on Salesforce,” Oner says.

And he didn’t stop there. Next came financial aid and student accounts, then registrar functions and advising centers.

“From there, we expanded to many of the auxiliary support units, tutoring and other offices that regularly interact with students,” he says. “More recently, we went live with philanthropy and alumni engagement on Salesforce as well.”

DISCOVER: Modern ITSM tools streamline the help desk.

Western Governors University has pursued a similar path, applying ServiceNow to IT service management and then customizing the platform to support security and HR use cases.

“Say you just need help with scheduling an assessment, or you might have a financial aid question,” says John Morton, vice president of IT infrastructure and security. “Or it might be something with the academic office, where you have an issue with some credits.” The team is tapping ServiceNow to support all of those functions.

“In security, we’re using ServiceNow for vulnerability management. There are integrations with the vulnerability scanning tools,” he says. And on the administrative side, “our HR department is using ServiceNow to run tickets and cases for employees, things like, ‘I have a problem with my paycheck,’ or, ‘I need to request a leave of absence.’ We keep track of those in the platform.”

Platform Implementation Often Takes a Crawl, Walk, Run Approach

It’s clear that these powerful platforms can support a range of functions in higher education. But how to get from here to there? These schools have taken a range of approaches as they’ve worked to maximize the return on their platform investments.

LEARN MORE: ServiceNow as a Service helps universities maximize ROI.

At the University of Notre Dame, IT leaders turned to CDW for support as they looked to expand their ServiceNow use cases.

“We have always had a bucket of hours with CDW for managed services,” O’Brien says. “My team is small, and if we needed some experience on something we hadn’t touched before, we could use those hours to get an expert or an architect who’s done it before to walk through it with us.”

He tapped that support as the team expanded ServiceNow into areas including governance, risk and compliance, and third-party risk management.

“I know ServiceNow, I know the platform,” he says. “Our audit and advisory people know audit and advisory, risk, and compliance. But neither of us know how compliance and risk work in the ServiceNow ecosystem,” he says. CDW helped connect those dots. “It’s our first time doing it in ServiceNow, but they’ve done it 100 or 1,000 times.”

At UNLV, Oner has seen that success drives organic growth of Salesforce on campus. As various business units saw what the platform could do, “they started coming to us, rather than us having to recruit them to the platform,” he says. “In meetings across campus, Salesforce became something people talked about.”

To capitalize on that enthusiasm, Oner sought to create Salesforce champions across campus.

“The sweet spot is where technical and functional expertise meet,” he says. “The most effective champions are business leaders who understand their process challenges and can see how technology can be applied.”

At WGU, Morton has effectively combined both these approaches in growing the ServiceNow footprint.

To support organic growth, “we work with the business, whatever the area is that we want to bring in,” Morton says. “We’re getting approval from the vice president of that area. It’s not done in a vacuum. It’s a partnership.”

 “ServiceNow has an ecosystem of vendor partners that are experts in both the platform and the capabilities,” says WGU Senior Software Engineering Manager Tina Watson. “When we’re implementing a brand-new capability, we will often work with a vendor partner that has experience with that capability.”

UP NEXT: Customer relationship management software helps manage the student lifecycle.

Software Solutions Lead to Practical Benefits

Universities report a range of tangible improvements when they use a single platform to tackle multiple processes on campus.

O’Brien says the built-in capabilities of ServiceNow make it easy to address new challenges as they emerge.

“We already have the platform up. Now we just need to configure that particular application,” he says. “The effort’s still high, but it’s not like starting from scratch.”

Moreover, the connections between the various use cases on the platform help to deliver a common picture. In the past, “you could have an incident open in four systems, and none of them got updated when you closed it in one system,” he says. “Now, we’ve got one source of truth.”

Morton says the combined data available in ServiceNow makes IT far more responsive. “Having all of that data in one place, we can do really excellent reporting,” he says. “We can identify root causes that would be really hard to understand if data was in disparate places.”

That means IT can solve problems fast. “When vulnerabilities come in, we know right away who they belong to, and it saves the effort to track that down” — which in turns leads to speedier resolutions, Watson says.

For Oner, the single-platform approach helps ensure the university is meeting its primary mission goal: supporting students’ needs.

“We have shifted from a reactive to a predictive model of student support,” he says. “Rather than being the last to hear that somebody had a problem, we are able to anticipate more support needs because of how connected systems are now.”

That has driven measurable impacts.

“Supported by these process improvements, we’ve seen a 61% increase in applications from 2016 to 2024, and a 14% increase in overall enrollment during that same period,” he says. “The retention rate has increased by more than 5%, and our six-year graduation rate has increased by over 10%. I believe that’s partly due to our ability to see a true 360-degree view of the student.”