The situation
The university had been running a ServiceNow instance originally deployed in 2014. Four departments (central IT, library services, facilities, and the research computing group) were all using the same instance with configurations layered on top of each other over a decade.
The platform team needed to modernize the instance without disrupting the 600 IT staff who used it daily.
What we did
We ran the modernization in two parallel tracks: a technical track that upgraded and cleaned up the instance configuration, and a process track that redesigned the service catalog for each department.
The service catalog redesign was the highest-value piece. We rebuilt the catalog using Employee Center Pro as the unified front door, with department-specific catalog items surfaced by user persona. A student sees different catalog items than a faculty member, who sees different items than a researcher with HPC access.
Results
- Four department catalogs consolidated into one portal
- Catalog items cut from 340 to 89, the rest retired or merged
- Self-service rate up from 22% to 51% within 90 days of launch
- Now Assist deployed for incident summarization and catalog search
- Zero unplanned outages during the migration window