Case Study: The James Hutton Institute achieves a 50% survey response rate and streamlined IT/non‑IT self-service with OpenText SMAX

SMAX provides engaging self-service user experience and combines IT and non-IT requests for more efficient and transparent service delivery.

The James Hutton Institute, a Scotland-based research organisation with around 500 staff and 150 PhD students, faced a fragmented approach to handling requests from roughly 600 users. Multiple islands of service (SharePoint and an older automation tool) gave users no single place to submit requests and left the 14-person IT team without clear visibility to allocate resources or extend the portal to estates, communications and finance.

Working with partner EOH, the Institute adopted Micro Focus SMAX—trialling the platform, migrating integrations over a single weekend and rolling out enhancements. SMAX delivers a unified self-service portal, virtual agents, knowledge management, surveys and Hot Topics Analytics; it now handles about 500 IT and 300 non‑IT requests monthly, increased survey response rates from ~10% to 50%, generated thousands of knowledge-article views, and boosted user engagement and prioritization of follow-up work.

The James Hutton Institute

Ben Watt

End User Computing Manager