Imperial College London is moving its IT service management(ITSM)into the cloud after it grew out of its eight-year-old system.
The project will be monitored and,if it proves as successful as expected,the college could move more IT to the cloud.
The move to ServiceNow's cloud-based service will cut costs and increase the number of IT service requests that can be dealt with by the person making it through self-services.
"We have been using the current system for eight years and when we bought it we thought it would need replacing after 5 years,"said Paul Carter,Imperial ICT service centre manager.
He said the system being replaced needed additional web development to improve the user interface."We had to do web development ourselves to improve things like self-service."
He said with a small team of four supporting this part of IT the extra overhead was unacceptable.The time savings were critical because the team can focus on areas other than supporting the system."Because it is outsourced we have time to do more to improve the user experience,"he said.
"We do not have to support hardware and upgrade it regularly,"he added.
The college initially looked at 15 ITSM systems and narrowed it down to four.Of these,three were cloud-based.
"Three claimed to be cloud-based but not all entirely convincingly,"added Carter.
He said ServiceNow was the most convincing cloud service but added that this was not sole reason it chose it:"If we had come across a great product that was not cloud-based we would consider it."
Imperial College signed up for access to the service in January and will migrate the first group of users to it next week.It will then complete further migrations.
Carter said he is not expecting any difficulties technically because none of the existing records are being moved over.
He said the college has a few small apps that are cloud-based but this will be the biggest migration,which could lead to more.
"Providing this works as expected it will demonstrate to our academics and managers that there is no harm moving things to the cloud."he said.
Imperial College joins organisations such as Deloitte,SkyIQ,Enterprise Holdings and the Wellcome Trust in moving ITSM to ServiceNow's cloud.
