With so many universities basing their reputations on STEM subjects, one would expect these educational behemoths to have the best digital infrastructures available. But many universities are still processing applications manually, on paper — not to mention the rest of their infrastructure. And where they do use technology, they often force students and their parents to navigate a confusing system of portals, websites, email clients and convoluted invoices to find answers to their questions — even when their questions are as simple as, “How much do I owe this semester?”

Brian Clark, former executive director of ITS at RMIT University, is dedicated to changing that in his work consulting for Australian Universities, and ServiceNow is his platform of choice.

Agile, real-time and dynamic solutions

According to Clark, “As a software engineer, I’m typically pretty skeptical of applications … And I was really impressed as we went through the evaluation with the strength of the application and the amount of capability and functionality that ServiceNow is adding.”

For him, that capability and functionality includes a solid user experience that intuitively provides everything the user needs. On the developer side, it should also offer agile, real-time, and dynamic solutions — which doesn’t always require developing a separate app for mobile users. “Most of the things that students want from the university revolve around some pretty basic functionality and a lot information. And so that’s really easily delivered via responsive web.”

The changing model of software

What is his advice for young developers? Harness the power of platform and start providing solutions instead of waiting around for the capital to start from scratch.

“One of the things I think the changing model of software has allowed is the ability to build really strong, functional apps in quite a short period of time. In my day, when I was writing code for a living, you spent a lot of time doing the underlying stuff. So whether it’s ServiceNow or any number of platforms that are out there, you can build the icing on top pretty quickly, and it doesn’t take a huge investment.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 15.