London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Improves Analytics

Jan 21, 2016

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is to use new tech to provide greater insight into its IT infrastructure, plus improve efficiency and the level of service provided.

As a world-leading centre for research and postgraduate education in public and global health, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine has more than 4,000 students and 1,000 staff working in over 100 countries.The introduction of the new platform, from end-user analytics specialist Nexthink, is being framed as part of the School’s ongoing aim to deliver an exceptional quality of IT to all its staff and students.

The School has 55 full-time IT staff, undertaking all aspects of daily operational support and change delivery, including a 12-strong HelpDesk team who field about 500 calls a week. Previously, the team has been predominantly focused on managing incidents and responding to service requests, with little time spent investigating and resolving underlying problems.

The new software, Nexthink V6, is claimed to pro-actively monitors IT networks and reports on important end-user related events, such as changes in the IT infrastructure, application usage and bandwidth, error messages and crashes, as well as potential security risks. This ensures the performance of IT services is recorded and uniquely visualised from the end-user’s perspective, says the supplier.

Greater Detail For Support Teams

Jon Faulkner, Chief Information Officer, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, says that. “Through the use of Nexthink, we hope to gain swifter clarity as to the root cause of problems so that we can respond in a timelier manner, and before other end-users become impacted by the same underlying issue.

"This level of analysis will also enable HelpDesk staff to pass on greater detail to third line support for the more complex matters to be resolved. Our aim is to reduce the average HelpDesk call numbers by 15%. We intend to deploy the Nexthink solution to all School issued devices, in all locations, to maximise its application. In parallel to this, we will also take advantage of the ability to design more elegant solutions during our change activities to ensure that we are not building problems for the future.

"Another critical area of benefit will be the security analytics tools that are core within the Nexthink solution and will further strengthen our existing security capabilities,” he added.