University of the Highlands and Islands joins UniDesk

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UniDesk is a shared service management solution originally developed in partnership by Abertay, Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities.  The service incorporates ITIL based processes, guidance and support tailored to further and higher education process flows. The UniDesk service also prospers from a strong user community which actively contributes to the continuous improvement of the service. The current UniDesk service is built on the TOPdesk Service Management solution: https://www.topdesk.com/uk/

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The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) is the UK’s only fully tertiary educational institute, delivering School Link, FE, HE and Research with 13 Academic Partners.  Covering a geographical area the size of Belgium, from Shetland to the Scottish Borders, the partnership has over 80 campus sites and serves a user base of approximately 40,000 users.

Mike Burns, Customer Service Manager for UHI’s Learning and Information Services says their decision to join UniDesk will help UHI with delivering equivalence of support experience across all their user base whether it be at one of their city campus sites in Inverness or Perth to a remote learning centre in Shetland.

The University of the Highlands and Islands are delighted to be joining the UniDesk family. After careful analysis of our current requirements and our future plans, it was a unanimous decision to join the UniDesk shared service. Bringing UHI into UniDesk with our 13 Academic Partners is, we believe, a game changing approach to our service delivery model.

 The UniDesk service management team have been also been a major factor in our decision to join. Taking the time to understand our business they have worked closely with us to ensure we could achieve a compliant procurement. With the expected support from the team and the engaged UniDesk community, UHI are confident the UniDesk platform will help us achieve our strategic aims.

Mike Burns

In addition to the founding Universities, Edinburgh, Abertay and St Andrews, other members benefitting from sharing administrative knowledge and working practices are Sheffield Hallam, Ulster, Stirling, Edinburgh Napier and Durham Universities. The University of Edinburgh alone logs approximately 1800 calls a day via UniDesk and is used by over 1500 operators.

Mark Ritchie, Deputy Director of Applications Directorate and Chair of the UniDesk Board, said “I am very excited to be welcoming The University of the Highlands and Islands to the UniDesk family. UHI’s unique organisational structure, energy and commitment is sure to bring innovation and added value to the UniDesk service. Our experience working with Mike and his team has already been very positive and we are confident that we can achieve great things together.”

(Ed. this article was originally published on 22 Aug, 2018)