The CORE Debate

Pros and Cons: TheCOREdebate.docx

Discussion:

Training and Publications

• often the decision is already made when the work is assigned to the team
• team attached to the project for much longer
• need to have a programmatic response

A tool to prioritize our work

• need to define 80% of what is core
• what is our investment in core services?
• where is the data to know what we should focus on?
• which problems are we trying to solve?
• knowing WHAT is more important - it differs across faculty/students/staff
• community impacts
• financial and resource impacts of support (costs often fall to staff doing transactions)

Core behaviors as opposed to core products

• are we acting in a "default core" way already
• focusing on core services would remove some support for users
• what about VIPs, where we have individual rules?
  • focus on core services so we can become experts and provide better service
  • provide quality and ease of use
  • how do we convince people its the right thing to do?
• apply same principals to core services to provide high quality service (need departmental approach)
• VIPs have resources and we don't want them going to others - we want to be the ones they trust

Sometimes the fringe help is minimal in cost and resources

• but it is often the "big win"
• not as much reward/recognition for solving core, its what we are supposed to do

Core is a loaded word - its dynamic, not static

• so how do we distill that into a list? 
• right focus right now, and how do we regularly evaluate that?
• lists are comforting, essential for consistency
• helps people better define your role
• having everything on the list is as bad as no list at all

Taking the definition of core and bringing it down to our work

• MIT is a business and it needs to run
• we are a cost to MIT
• what are the core activities n campus we want to be supporting as a department?
• HOW do we want to support them?
• need to share and get buy in
• still need to preserve innovation
• we want to be consistent, high quality, the "go to" IT department
• what do we want to enable our customers to do easily and reliably?
• challenge is the new stuff coming into our culture

Having the requirement of minimizing support and documentation

• make it so easy they don't need to call us (stretch goal!)
• but by whom and when?

What's the process to manage something that's core?

• process change
• looking at changing our business to make tools easier
• what about changing our rules based restrictions?

Do we have any data on who does not call the help desk?

• what are they doing right?
• the fact they don't call does not mean they don't need help

Departmental Services

• core services don't matter - you're there on SLA to do what the DLC wants
• what is the downstream impact of that on Service Desk?
• its core and best effort on other stuff vs helping customers as partner and making recommendations
• guiding DLCs to the right tools
• consult and align DLCs
• understand the functions that they want and we install the best tool
• define our services better in the SLAs
  • huge cultural shift
  • we could reinforce this by making fringe cost more $$$

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