Higher education institutions manage complex service environments, operating digital and physical campuses while supporting students, faculty, staff and researchers with competing needs. Internal IT teams must absorb rising demand without adding resources, leaving
Together, Freshworks and Unisys address this challenge by pairing Freshworks’ purpose-built IT and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) platform with Unisys’ deep experience guiding higher education institutions through the people, process and technology integration required for lasting transformation.
The Real Cost of Complexity in Higher Education
Higher education IT’s challenge is not only aging infrastructure; it is fragmented tools that force staff into manual, repetitive work across systems that do not communicate. When dozens of disconnected systems hold partial data, there is no single source of truth, requiring context switching for every service interaction.
Freshworks’ Hidden Costs of Complexity: Global Survey Findingsreports IT professionals lose an average of 6.8 hours per week navigating complex systems. The same study also found one in every five software dollars are wasted on underutilized licenses, duplicate departmental purchases and failed integrations, otherwise known as “regret spend.” That waste reduces resources for student success, faculty support and institutional innovation.
Distributed decision-making adds to the complexity: departments buy their own tools, creating sprawl that central IT cannot see. Students bring personal devices, research grants fund their own equipment and hybrid classrooms and online programs keep expanding IT’s responsibilities—without a matching increase in headcount.
A Problem Felt at Every Level of the Institution
Fragmented service delivery affects more than IT. When students cannot resolve Wi-Fi issues, faculty cannot get timely classroom technology support or staff cannot reach the right administrative department, the institution absorbs the reputational cost regardless of which team is responsible.
Fragmented systems and inconsistent service make the university appear fragmented, creating student equity risk through inconsistent access to services that affect academic outcomes. Meanwhile, IT teams managing backlogs across disconnected platforms are not innovating or improving service quality, they are simply keeping up. Every shadow IT system introduced outside central governance creates another security and compliance risk.
What Uncomplicating IT Looks Like
Service delivery transformation does not require ripping out existing systems or pursuing sweeping changes overnight. Freshworks and Unisys frame simplified service delivery in four steps:
- Audit Existing Systems: A rigorous software rationalization audit maps every tool to the service and users it supports across colleges and departments, not just central IT. This surfaces duplicate capabilities, underutilized licenses and failed integrations while building the budget case for change.
- Consolidate Strategically: Fragmented legacy environments often require staff to use 5-10 tools for one service interaction. A unified platform reduces context switching and speeds resolution. In Freshworks’ Benchmark Report 2025, 76% of institutions reported faster resolution time.
- Implement AI Purposefully: Artificial intelligence (AI) supports intelligent routing, repetitive triage and knowledge assistance so human staff can focus on interactions requiring human judgment. The Benchmark Report 2025 states AI-powered self-service has improved end-user resolution times by 76%.
- Build a Culture of Simplification: Lasting transformation requires leaders to support consolidation and challenge that more tools equal more capability. Institutions should choose technology partners focused on reducing tool sprawl.
ESM as an Operating Model
Freshworks unified service delivery platform integrates IT Service Management (ITSM), ESM, asset management and operations management on a single shared Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Instead of assembling point products or bolt-on modules, AI is woven throughout the platform, making it context-aware across service workflows rather than an add-on for individual functions.
For higher education, low- and no-code configuration enables deployments in weeks without requiring deep internal technical expertise to launch or maintain the system. Transparent, predictable pricing helps avoid the licensing complexity that contributes to regret spend, while a vast integration marketplace and developer tools help institutions avoid lock-in.
The result is a single front door for service interactions through web portals, mobile devices, email or collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Service teams across HR, finance, facilities, legal and IT keep their workflows and service catalogs while operating on one platform with shared visibility. Success metrics shift from ticket volume to user experience, resolution speed and measurable outcomes leadership can act on.
Managing the Human Side of Transformation
Successful transformation requires more than technology alone. Freshworks’ The Cost of Complexity: The Mid-Market AI Complexity Trap shows that organizations struggle when complexity, governance gaps and implementation challenges outpace execution, underscoring the importance of people, process and operational discipline alongside technology. With decades of experience guiding higher education technology transitions, Unisys provides Freshworks-trained resources and organizational change management expertise to help ensure new systems are adopted, not abandoned.
Unisys runs two parallel tracks in every engagement:
- Process and Project Management: Prepares the solution for the people.
- Organizational Change Management: Prepares the people for the solution.
Implementations fail when adoption is an afterthought rather than a primary workstream. In higher education’s distributed environments, early stakeholder involvement determines whether transformation takes hold or generates resistance.
Unisys also addresses higher education-specific complexity technology alone cannot solve: environments with thousands of unmanaged student devices, CMDB asset lifecycle management across grant-funded research equipment, staff turnover and knowledge gaps that accumulate when systems and personnel change faster than documentation.
A Maturity Model Built for Realistic Progress
Freshworks and Unisys use a four-stage maturity model to help institutions assess where they are and chart a realistic path forward: reactive, structured, unified and value acceleration. Most higher education institutions fall between reactive, where service success depends on individual effort instead of a defined process, and structured, where core processes exist but departmental silos persist.
The goal is not to leap to the top of the model, but to move one level at a time. Each step delivers measurable return and builds the foundation for the next. An institution managing service requests in spreadsheets is not ready for enterprise AI but digitizing that workflow and establishing reliable processes makes future AI investments more likely to succeed. That sequencing is the discipline Unisys brings and the platform architecture Freshworks makes possible.
To learn more about how higher education institutions can reduce complexity, consolidate service delivery and build a foundation for AI-ready operations, watch the full Freshworks and Unisys’s webinar “Uncomplicating IT: Reimagining ISM/ESM to Transform Higher Ed Service Delivery.”
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