Shared Services – IT Connect

IT Shared Services: Quarterly Report Now Available

As part of our continuing efforts to make as many of our processes as transparent as possible, our third quarter reports for all campus IT departments are now available for your reference. Click here for a list of all of the documents.

Each document is a separate report for each school and the Central University Libraries. They contain details on the amount of incidents that were reported and how they were handled. There are also updates from our Director of Customer Service, Rachel Mulry, on the large-scale IT projects taking place in each area.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding these reports, feel free to drop us a line at help@smu.edu.

IT Roundtable Event: A Great Conversation

Roundtable Discussion with the IT Leaders

Yesterday, the IT Leadership met with various faculty and staff in an open roundtable discussion. We had prepared a PowerPoint presentation outlining where we’ve been and a few strategic items on the horizon. Prior to the event, we decided that we’d much rather facilitate a conversation with the attendees and answer their questions. Of course, we had the presentation to fall back on if there weren’t questions at the IT Roundtable. Fortunately, what resulted was a candid and collaborative discussion taking the full hour and a half! Continue reading IT Roundtable Event: A Great Conversation

Lyle Unification Project Update: August 2016

Over this summer, OIT has worked diligently to unify Lyle services. We have made progress with networking, including wireless, and lab updates over these past months.

The Lyle wired networking equipment was updated to the latest software providing more security and stability. We have also inventoried the wall jack locations to increase our response time when tickets are generated. Continue reading Lyle Unification Project Update: August 2016

Service Desk Quarterly Reports

Since a majority of the help requests are captured within our help desk ticketing system, we have access to a large amount of data regarding the types of issues or requests being made on a regular basis. Although the ticket metrics do not provide a comprehensive picture of the work being done by IT, it does provide some valuable information about trends, typical response times and areas for improvement.

A few weeks ago, a report was sent to each of the schools capturing some general information and metrics gleaned from the ticket system as well as key highlights from the shared services transition. The metrics presented can serve simply as a baseline for understanding service levels. After producing the initial report, we’ve identified several processes where we need to report in much more detail to capture the actual service level. So adjustments are being made so the data will be more meaningful to the campus community.

For example, a single account request may involve up to 14 different sub-tickets before it is complete. The response time in the reports capture the average time to resolve an account issue but does not take into account how many subtickets are involved! So in future reports, I hope to illustrate how long it takes for each subgroup to process their portion or how long it takes for access to each system.

The first reports are now available for the SMU Community. It is our goal to share our progress as we implement and improve this shared services model. This report will be published on a quarterly basis. To access the report, visit www.smu.edu/OIT/AboutUs/SharedServices.

Cox Infrastructure Project Update

As part of the IT Initiative and overall vision for IT Shared Services, several operational services will be unified within the existing University services. This will allow the local Academic Leads to focus on IT vision, strategy and best practices in partnership with the Dean and their faculty. The following Cox services are designated for unification: networking and security appliances, wireless, VPN, and Active Directory.

Network maintenance has been underway for several weeks upgrading the various network switches and Wireless Access Points throughout the buildings. The team has also reviewed many of the servers hosted in Cox to determine the migration strategy. Several services were decommissioned as they were no longer in use. We have also completed the testing phase of migrating the Cox workstations to the SMU domain.

We are now ready to begin the migration of the Cox computers to the SMU domain. This will allow Cox faculty and staff to login to their workstations using the SMU ID and password thus eliminating the extra set of credentials. Each individual will be notified of the date of their scheduled migration. Cox faculty and staff should NOT attempt to login with their ID prior to the migration date.

Additional instructions will be provided with the migration schedule. For more details on the Cox infrastructure project, visit http://www.smu.edu/OIT/Projects/CoxInfrastructure.