University of Miami Reveals the Benefits and Challenges of IT Consolidation

With more than 40,000 faculty, staff, and students spread across 11 schools and colleges on five campuses, the University of Miami is a complex institution with diverse technology support needs.

When I started at the university over eight years ago, University of Miami Information Technology (UMIT) operations were spread out across the campuses, largely working in silos. Each IT office had vastly different network systems, job responsibilities, and compensation structures, various hardware, software, operating systems, and devices were also being employed throughout the university.

Needless to say, it was difficult to provide standardized and efficient IT support across the network.

We needed to find a way for our roughly 600 IT support professionals to work more closely as a unified team, so we began a major consolidation effort.

This started by bringing everyone under one roof and streamlining all the necessary office logistics. Once we had everyone on the same page job responsibility-wise, pay structure, etc., it was time to look at how we – as a team – supported the University’s vast IT needs.

One of the first steps in this process was getting everyone to use the same tools, so that we could service end users and systems in a uniform manner.

We deployed ServiceNow IT Management software to improve our service delivery model, as well as streamlined some of the backend operations. Our goal was to ensure that our internal processes were operating as efficiently as possible.

We also needed a secure way to remotely access devices and systems.

Prior to the consolidation effort, a number of tools were used to remote into devices across the multiple IT operations. But, even then, technicians were still spending valuable time traveling to physical locations for various tasks.

As you can imagine, this caused a lot of frustration for our end-users, as they received different service delivery methods. This also brought along frustration for us as an IT department due to the inconsistencies of our processes, support tools, and reporting tools for managers.

Bomgar was one of the tools we used previously, so we decided to make it our only channel for remote access due to the integration capabilities with ServiceNow, and since it was the most secure option.