The university’s experience with other incident tracking applications, including Remedy®, was varied. There were “inherent flaws” with the applications – from aesthetics to design and workflow – none of which was well-suited for a fast-paced support center in an educational environment. Over time, the university’s frustration with limited and cumbersome legacy systems grew so large that the IT team demanded a change. They needed a system that they could easily customize to their unique and ever-changing needs. Prior to Cherwell Service Management, the university’s service desk was unable to capture “incident details in a fast, efficient manner.” Other pain points included their inability to use custom dashboards, root cause identification and public notification of system-wide issues.

Enter Cherwell Service Management,™ offering enterprise-power at a mid-market price – the perfect combination to meet the university’s challenge. For example, Cherwell’s Incident Management was so robust, yet easy-to-customize, that it required very little effort out-of-the- box for the university to begin using it in earnest. With the Cherwell Development Platform™, a Codeless Business Application

Technology (CBAT), no special programming skills were required for the university to customize the application. A number of the university’s IT support professionals were able to use Cherwell to create and share personal content across the enterprise (such as dashboards, Cherwell One-Steps, searches, and reports).

“We literally have a base of Cherwell Service Management fans that love working in the application, something we never had with previous products,” said the IT Director. With its “ITIL® Made Easy” approach to content, Cherwell also provided “a painless ITIL approach and made implementation of ITIL best practices a new reality” for the University. As a result, the IT team has progressed beyond Incident tracking and now utilizes the many other features of Cherwell Service Management, including Change, Service Level, Problem and Configuration Management.

According to the University’s IT Director, “[t]here is no doubt that Cherwell service Management has changed the way our support professionals do business for the better. They love it and enjoy using and crafting the tools every day.” Not surprisingly, the university’s major benefit stems from the fact that Cherwell has improved the experience for the customers served by the IT department – i.e., the faculty,staff and students. “Self-service, the knowledgebase, customer satisfaction surveys, and data availability; all of these have raised our clients abilities to be more productive and effective in their jobs, relying less on the Help Desk itself and more on the services the Help Desk provides. It has been a transformational shift on our campus, contributing to a much higher satisfaction rating of our support unit as a whole.”