QUT last night beat a quality field of finalists to be announced winner of the Service Desk Team Project of the Year category at itSMF Australia's prestigious annual ITSM Industry Awards in Sydney.
Announced as part of the 2015 Gala Dinner during itSMFA's 18th National Conference, the ITSM Industry Awards acknowledge excellence in IT service management improvement programs in five categories.
QUT had selected a new service desk management tool from HEAT Software, the leading provider of Hybrid Service Management and Unified Endpoint Management software, as its new help desk IT platform which forms a core component of a wide-ranging effort to improve the delivery of IT services.
Mark McCormack, Manager, Technology Support, Learning Environments and Technology Services at QUT, said he was thrilled that QUT has won the itSMFA award after an enormous collaborative effort from the in-house Service Desk team, the software vendor and systems integration partner, Fusion 5.
"Winning this prestigious award is a great recognition of the success of this project and the hard work that went into it from everyone involved," Mr. McCormack said. "The revitalisation of our service desk has allowed the University to blend best practices with configurable tools to more effectively manage workloads, enhance self-service offerings, and measure service quality improvements.
"QUT's Service Desk team supports 47,000 students and more than 4,500 staff. It receives approximately 300 support phone calls per day along with approximately 100 emails and a similar number of online logged jobs.
"Once we had the new Heat Software platform in place, we were able to embark on a journey to better align our people and processes with the cutting edge technology we use. Our primary motivation for undertaking the project was to add value to the teaching, learning and research activities across the university."
Key objectives from the project included an enhancement of self-service offerings, reduced resolution times and improved efficiency of support channels.
Following the implementation of the new system, there was a 200 per cent improvement in self-service uptake with a 130% increase in tailored requests reducing manual intervention from the Service Desk team.
In addition, changes in service management processes, improvements in knowledge management practices and a heightened focus on personalised performance reporting has reduced average resolution times for requests and incidents by half.
QUT's Service Desk team has also experienced a 38 per cent reduction of time-consuming email requests as a key deliverable and has now set a notional target for being able to phase out this inefficient support channel by the end of 2015.
McCormack said that the focus of the service desk project was to provide the highest levels of service possible to the university.
"HEAT Software implementation was at the core of this successful project and it has been instrumental in achieving service improvement," Mr Mc Cormack said. "We want to leverage everything we can out of the tool-set to continue engineering process improvement, cost efficiency and a higher level of customer satisfaction.
"It is a tremendous honour for all involved to receive this accolade after being scrutinised by a highly experienced group of peers in the ITSM industry and then being judged as the best nominated service desk team project of the year.
With HEAT, customers can choose from either cloud and on premise deployment models as well as a hybrid option that leverages both. QUT is currently deploying HEAT on its own infrastructure but is now looking at also giving clients the option to utilise cloud services and voice activation to access the platform for incident, request, service catalog, change management, configuration, and survey requests.
Media contact:
QUT Media, 07 3138 2361, media@qut.edu.au
About HEAT Software
HEAT Software is a leading provider of Hybrid Service Management and Unified Endpoint Management software solutions for organisations of all sizes. With its suite of applications, HEAT Software is the only company in the world that provides, from a single platform, Service Management and Unified Endpoint Management software on premise and in the cloud. HEAT manages millions of service interactions and millions of endpoints every day for thousands of leading organisations across IT, HR, Facilities, Finance, Customer Service and other enterprise functions. Its customers deliver world-class service while maximising operational efficiencies with reduced cost and complexity. HEAT Software is headquartered in Milpitas, Calif. For more information, visit www.HEATSoftware.com.
About Fusion5
Fusion5 is a business applications company delivering solutions across key functional areas of an organization including: Enterprise Resource Management, Customer Relationship Management, Customer Experience, HR / Payroll and Service Management. We sell, implement and support leading solutions that bring recognisable benefits to our customers.
We are experts in: developing solutions, application configuration, business process improvements and best practice consulting. We have helped over 500 public and private organisations throughout Australia and New Zealand.
Formed in 2002, our team of over 220 people provides localised services from eight cities throughout Australia and New Zealand.
Our success is widely recognised; we are the top 4 JDE reseller globally and a 5 star NetSuite partner. In 2014 Fusion5 was awarded Oracle Cloud Partner of the Year Asia Pac.
