UTO Team Transforms Culture and the Use of ServiceNow University-Wide

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As ASU continues to monitor COVID-19, the university has transitioned from in-person teaching and learning to remote options. In this challenging time, however, the collective innovation of ASU faculty and staff has demonstrated remarkable adaptability. As a method of celebrating the good during uncertain developments, the University Technology Office is gathering success stories of “remote resilience” from the ASU community. The situation globally and across the country is changing daily, but we also plan to share these stories to keep pace.

ASU employs numerous tools to support learning, teaching and working at the university. In a remote modality, many have risen in necessity, enabling communication and the experiences that are no longer possible face-to-face. ServiceNow is one of those tools, a cloud computing software that allows users, all 30,000 of them at ASU, to manage their services and products. Now, it’s become even more essential to keep the university up and running.

From January 2019 through March 2020, requests through ServiceNow were up 244 percent over 2018. UTO’s ServiceNow team is also seeing a surge in usage just within the past month, with a big part of their work dedicated to distributing equipment to students who need it to learn remotely. “We couldn’t plan this outcome,” ServiceNow developer Chelsey Ingersoll said. “But our team coalesced together differently after this project.” Collaborating at a scale they never had before, this team astonishingly created a rough draft of a system to monitor and take stock of laptops and hot spots that were checked out from locations across the ASU campuses.

Implemented over the course of a couple of weeks, this inventory mechanism not only represents a fulfillment of an essential need for the university in a remote modality, but also a silver lining of working within such a modality. Ingersoll said the “ad-hoc mode allowed a quick and effective solution,” developing a new team culture in the process.

The ServiceNow team’s united vision of a customer-forward approach has resulted in innovative, free customizations for every college and department at ASU, including Athletics and the ASU Police Department. Ingersoll explained they are often asked “What’s possible in ServiceNow?” Her answer? “Don’t ask what’s possible, ask us what you need.” As those needs have surged in a remote modality, she and her team have remarkably risen to the task and fostered a connection that will continue post-pandemic.