The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), one of the foremost social science universities in the world, has deployed Hornbill's Supportworks ITSM to provide support to over 11,400 staff and students using IT services across its London city campus. The IT department provides support by phone, email and 'virtual assistance' (text based chat) as well as holding walk-in 'surgery sessions' for student laptop users. The team uses Supportworks to log all incidents, as well as to implement Problem and Change Management, with plans to introduce Configuration Management and a new customer self service portal in the Autumn.

According to James Hargrave, User Support Manager in IT Services at LSE: "We were looking to introduce some ITIL processes and needed a solution that could handle Change and Configuration as well as Incident Management. The staff preferred Hornbill's user interface to the other alternatives we evaluated and we felt that the system worked well out-of-the-box, yet gave us enough scope to configure it to our needs.

We have maintained our service levels and are consistently meeting our SLAs, despite an increase in call volumes. This has been achieved within existing staffing resources as a result of working more efficiently. There is no doubt that the investment that we have made in Supportworks has been excellent value for money as we have been able to achieve many productivity gains."

The IT department is using the call statistics captured by Supportworks ITSM to identify peaks and troughs in workload. Call and user volumes are being tracked to identify patterns and plan the timing of Change Management programmes such as maintenance to the campus networks and upgrades to system software to minimise user disruption.

Gerry Sweeney, CEO of Hornbill Systems, commented: "In these challenging times we are seeing an increasing number of IT departments looking to improving efficiencies and work smarter. Supportworks ITSM has been developed to support service desks by providing a tool to manage and prioritise calls and workload, maximising the available resource. Automating routine processes and adopting ITIL working practices can enable IT departments to work more efficiently and provide a better customer service. Many companies are finding that utilising such a system can provide a clear return on investment to the business with the resulting end user satisfaction and improved productivity."

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NOTES TO EDITORS
About The London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is one of the foremost social science universities in the world. It is a specialist university with an international intake and a global reach. Its research and teaching includes all of the social sciences, including economics, politics, law, sociology, anthropology, accounting and finance.
LSE has a cosmopolitan staff and student body, located within its London city centre campus. It has around 8,700 full-time students and over 800 part-time students at LSE from around 140 countries around the world. The School also has over 1,460 full-time and 1,320 part-time members of staff.
For more information, please visit:
www.lse.ac.uk