ITS is close to the finish line of Remedy retirement

ITS is close to the finish line of retiring Remedy. The ITS team hopes to migrate the remaining Remedy applications by the end of January.

When ITS launched the ServiceNow platform to various university organizations in July 2019, ServiceNow replaced Remedy Request for Service, which is the most commonly used request tracking application in UNC-Chapel Hill Remedy. Twenty years ago, ITS started using the system.

ServiceNow is a more efficient, transparent and accessible platform for automating business and support processes. Most notably, it is the main ticketing software of the university. To make better use of the ServiceNow platform and get more value from the cost of running it, moving additional applications from Remedy to ServiceNow is always part of the plan.

Focus on the strategic plan

This corresponds to the strategic opportunity to combine daily operations with appropriate daily processes and procedures in the next step of Carolina’s strategic plan at the University of Carolina. Fewer platforms running means less time, money and energy spent running and maintaining multiple platforms. This will enable service management team members to focus on providing better value to their customers in ServiceNow, while better managing the money and time spent on university IT resources.

3 recently disabled apps

Until a few months ago, ITS had produced four applications in Remedy-all of which were ready for retirement. Except for the Ram Shop app used by Barnes & Noble for the student store, these apps are internal apps of ITS.

Since May, the service management team has been able to phase out the three applications in Remedy and transfer these functions along with other tools to ServiceNow.

• On August 23, RASR (Rapid Management Service Request) replaced Remedy RF-1, a ten-year-old application used by almost everyone in ITS. Thanks to Mechelle Clayton of ITS Enterprise Applications and her team for managing the transition from RF-1 to RASR.
• In late July, ITS closed the Computer Repair Center (CRC) application and PeopleSoft billing used by CRC and Managed Desktop Services (MDS). CRC is now using Fixably, a third-party repair order application, combined with ServiceNow to process computer hardware repair requests for Lenovo, Mac, and Dell computers at UNC-Chapel Hill and Chapel Hill-Carrboro and Orange County Schools. Departments related to CRC now request repairs in ServiceNow, which triggers the workflow to create repair work orders for CRC technicians working at Fixably. Thank you David Eckert, Director of Managed IT Services, Peter Bolish, CRC Manager, and the entire ServiceNow team for all their hard work for this transition/integration.
• In early May, ITS transitioned the Ram Shop Invoice/Administration in Remedy to the TechShop workspace in ServiceNow. The Eckert and ServiceNow teams were honored for transitioning to the TechShop workspace.

Only one left

The last Remedy application remaining in production is system registration. The System Registration application is used to track assets in the ITS data center.

In early August, ITS launched a project to convert the application to ServiceNow’s request and asset management module. Since the service management team configures asset management relationships for data centers and laptop/computer assets, the final transition from system registration to SN asset management is more complicated. The team’s goal is to have system registration data in ServiceNow by the end of January 2022.

IT service management platform manager David Smith said that the Remedy application infrastructure has been running on unsupported versions of BMC Remedy AR Server, Oracle DB, Java and Linux OS, which poses a risk to ITS and also consumes resources for maintenance. Although the cost of infrastructure support is very low, the actual cost of ITS revolves around resources and risk reduction.

Once ITS has completed migrating these remaining applications, ITS will load the Remedy data into the data warehouse for reporting. Smith said that then ITS staff will close the Remedial Action Request System (ARS) service.