"K2 has completely changed the way we provide electronic services to our customers, they have brought us to an entirely new level, which was inaccessible beforehand. At the moment we are automating new processes, managing resources and systems with maximum efficiency."
Andrey Shevtsov,
Leading director of information technologies


Official website: http://hse.ru/

Technologies
K2 blackpearl 4.7,
K2 smartforms 4.7;
MS SQL Server + SSRS;
Microsoft Exchange;
Active Directory.

National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) is a research center which carries out its mission through its educational, scientific, expert, analytical, social and cultural activities on the basis of international scientific and organizational standards.

HSE has 4 campuses located in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod and Perm. There are more than 7000 lecturers and researchers, 35000 students and postgraduate students, over 65000 alumni.


THE PROBLEM
The rapid rate of the university's development, the expansion of educational programs, the increase in the number of lecturers and students and the growth of the network and computer infrastructure have required a dramatic transformation of the way the services are provided by the IT service as well as bringing the level of the services into line with the most advanced world standards.

The lack of automation and transparency while providing the IT services as well as the lack of due level of control, significant time-losses by specialists and line-managers on performing routine activities, uncomplete reference information, fragmentation and multiplicity of the used systems have all been significantly hampering the usage of information technologies within the university which led to the users' frustration. In order to manage the information effectively, the level of the maturity of the IT technologies, which would meet the level of dynamism and complexity of the processes within HSE.

THE SOLUTION
The project on the development of an interactive portal of self-service of the HSE employees with the application of BPM and the K2 platform became the solution to the problems. The project has not only changed the way of providing the IT services by bringing them to the most up-to-day level, but it has also altered the consciousness of the electronic services consumers. The transparency of the processes performed, the monitoring of their states in real time, easy navigation through the services catalogue and the system's intеrface, the ability to have the information at your fingertips anywhere in the world from any device, notifications and reminders sent by e-mail and SMS, the ability to rate the quality of the provided services and much more have made it possible for users to appreciate the benefits of the new approach.

The criterion, under which no request from the user, no matter how complicated, should take no more than 1 to 2 minutes to complete, has allowed to analyze carefully the information used by the user, to establish integration with the maximum number of handbooks and related systems by asking the user to provide only the essential part of the request and automatically filling in the rest. The usage of the product for interface development without programming K2 smartforms has allowed to quickly create the essential automated workplaces with the help from HSE specialists and to use the groundwork again in new projects.

As a result, the self-service portal for HSE employees became one of the key and critically important applications of the University. At present, the self-service portal provides not only IT-services, but also caters for other university services such as the Managerial and Economic Department, Case Management, Human Resources, Legal and Financial Services and many more.

In 2016 the project was awarded the National Prize "IT-Leader" in the category "Educational Institutions", which became the acknowledgement of the chosen direction of development and that BPM K2 was the right choice to make.

National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE)