Case Study: University of Alabama at Birmingham achieves 100+ IT wins and campus-wide innovation with IdeaScale

University of Alabama at Birmingham - Customer Case Study

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), a comprehensive urban research university with a nationally recognized academic health center, tasked new CIO Curtis A. Carver Jr. in 2015 with building a world-class IT organization that balanced cost efficiency, agility, and innovation — and committed to delivering 100 IT wins in his first year. The challenge was to rapidly surface meaningful improvements that would improve the daily lives of students, faculty, staff, and researchers across campus.

UAB IT launched SPARK, a campus-wide crowdsourcing program powered by IdeaScale and promoted via meetings, newsletters, social media and gamification. The campaign engaged 800+ users, generated 115 ideas and 4,000 votes, and delivered over 200 wins — including campus-wide unlimited email and storage, 10× faster research compute, two‑factor authentication and self‑service password reset, and major bandwidth upgrades — while creating a new voice of the customer and seeding ideas for ongoing IT strategic planning adopted across campus.

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Curtis Carver

CIO