The University of Calgary (UCalgary) intends to award up to a 5-year service contract with an optional up to 5-year extension to SeviceNow. ServiceNow is currently UCalgary’s ITSM tool, which is utilized by all customers of the University from students, staff, and alumni to potential students and the general public. This cloud-based application is a customizable platform that supports intake requests, online customer portals, Network discovery and IT inventory, IT Security and Vulnerability tracking, fulfillment workflows, service catalogs, event booking, planning and facilitating, and workload management for support teams at the University. ServiceNow is also being used by other Institutions throughout Alberta and is a well-known standard among IT departments worldwide. ServiceNow also allows for a Virtual Agent chatbot and the organization of knowledge base content, providing customers with how-tos and user guides to navigate the UCalgary environment. Additionally, ServiceNow houses the UCalgary Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) that includes tracking 8.5 million configuration items; business service maps delineating dependencies between services, applications and systems. It includes implementation of a Discovery system that automatically discovers objects on the network and adds them to the CMDB. ServiceNow currently interfaces with various programs that are used on a day-to-day basis, examples are Peoplesoft to obtain up to date user information and data from the ERP, Blue Prism RPA – to automate updates between ServiceNow and PeopleSoft, Active Directory – automating the provisioning of file share access, VMware and vRA – creating and maintaining VMs and access, PureCloud IVR system to automate ticket generation from incoming calls. Currently, ServiceNow is deeply entrenched within UCalgary’s technology ecosystem, being used by multiple business units outside of IT, including Finance, HR, Centre for health informatics, Conference & Events, Continuing Education, Advancement & Alumni, Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Science and Research Security. Approximately, 300 separate workflows are managed in ServiceNow. It is being used to track email intake and processes approximately 32,000 emails / week. There are over 550 fulfillment users processing tickets and working in ServiceNow, and an average of 7000 tickets generated by users per week. Vulnerabilities being tracked in the system as well as over 8.5 million configuration items being maintained in the IT inventory database. Due to the nature of how much everyone depends on ServiceNow, there is currently no alternative system. Due to how entrenched ServiceNow is with users, integrations and business units, it would not be practical to move on to another platform. A new system would cause major disruption for all users, as well, UCalgary would have to embed an alternative solution while the new system is running. UCalgary also does not have any additional resources or time to implement a new system. A new system would also require training all users and migrating existing integration into the new system.
