President's Report - FY10 Q4
- SD Accomplishments
- *Dell Study: *Began work with Dell Professional Services to conduct a detailed study of the IS&T Help Desk over the course of June. The study has included 14 in-person interviews with a cross with IS&T staff and representative customers, collection of detailed work surveys completed by Help Desk staff, as well as financial details. This data will be compiled and compared with peer institutions in higher education and industry and comparisons as well as key findings and recommendations will be shared in reports to stakeholders and Senior Management in early July.
- CertAid: Worked with colleagues across IS&T to rollout an improved CertAid tool as well as an improved Certificates acquisition page. This included conducting a usability review which highlighted the complexity for end users, and assisted in designing a new interface and some improved functionality.
- Matlab: Reviewed data related to our existing Matlab distribution and cost sharing model and used that data to design new model that enables us to move to the new Total Academic Headcount (TAH) offering from MathWorks.
- Exchange: Continued to offer on-site migration assistance as part of Tiger team. Developed Exchange Support Matrix to assist Help Desk consultants in handling Exchange related questions. Helped coordinate a series of meetings with Microsoft Technical Support representatives to assist us in understanding how to make the most effective use of our Exchange environment.
- IT Partners: Participated on planning team for IT Partners Conference. Presented sessions on Mobile Devices, Hermes, Providing Remote IT Support, and TSM Backup.
- G4 Symposium: Led the coordination of a Sprint 4G Symposium on MIT Campus.
- TNSC Settlements: Worked with Finance and Operations and Infrastructure to explore existing TNSC settlements as well as current support provided related to Telephone and Network Services.
- Leveraging MIT Innovation: Met with representatives in CSAIL who are working on a project to use artificial intelligence to automate repetitive and/or time-consuming technical support work. Held Help Desk meeting to discuss possible options for initial pilot uses.
- SD Issues and Trends
- Back to School - there is always a lot of preparation work as well as many late days, and weekend hours put in before and during the back to school rush.
- Re-focusing on new Customer Support staff, functions and organization of work. There will be challenges inherent in figuring out how to re-focus the work of Customer Support
- Responding to recommendations of Dell Help Desk Study. Depending on the nature of the findings and recommendations there is likely to be some challenging work to be done to improve our services.
- Establishing stronger, sustainable collaborations with other help desks on campus starting with Sloan. Preliminary conversations are already underway.
- Establishing ways to sustain engagement with support functions now in other parts of IS&T. With DS/DITR and ITSS in Operations and Infrastructure, and Training and Docs in Systems Engineering, we need to establish new communication and collaboration mechanisms to ensure a single IS&T approach to Customer Support.
- Student Laptop distribution at start of fall. Start of fall semester sees the highest demand for the student laptops. We will need to spend some time in the latter part of the summer making sure all the laptops are cleaned, maintained and ready to go.
- RT Upgrade. Assuming development continues on schedule and testing is successful, we will need to communicate broadly and plan for an upgrade to 3.8 in early fall. Currently the project lead position is open with Irina's departure.
- Hiring/Staffing – filling open positions created with shifts of staff during reorganization and/or staff departures.
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