Documents Contributed by ECAR, Help Desk, and Customer Service

This January 2007 survey informs research about the support services that higher education institutions provide to users of information technology resources. Help desks—sometimes called call centers or service desks, among other names—typically provide a first line of assistance to users of IT systems. Help desks vary widely in scope and effect. Part of the purpose of this survey is to assess that range of variation. The survey focuses on IT help desk services provided to the institution either directly through a central IT organization or through an outsourcing agreement.

When Indiana University prioritized support to match the demands posed by an expanding environment of pervasive computing, it put its decision-making strategies to the test. This research bulletin discusses the decision-making process that enabled the IT organization to recognize the need for a new support system, determine the structure of that system, find the capital to create it, and bring it from concept to production in less than two years. These principles, and the thinking behind them, have relevance to other colleges and universities.

As a sequel to the ECAR research bulletin "Customer-Centered IT Support: Foundations, Principles, and Systems" by the same authors, this bulletin describes the philosophy behind Indiana University's integrated support strategy, which is based on the principle of using technology to serve the customer and the information technology business. The bulletin details how University Information Technology Services combined existing support resources with new ones to arrive at an exponentially larger and better system that serves not only the customer but also the IT organization. Underlying all is the critical role of data in helping the organization effect a positive evolution in IT support.

To meet the IT support demands of more than 98,000 students and 15,000 faculty and staff across eight campuses, Indiana University developed a fully integrated Online Support Environment (OSE) that handles an average 2.5 million IT support contacts each year, or the equivalent of one every 12 seconds. For users, it looks like a vast array of IT services and a searchable database of IT questions and answers. For the IT organization, it supplies a dynamic picture of the questions users ask and the topics they research, as well as usage and satisfaction data. This bulletin discusses how IT met the challenge to provide pervasive, around-the-clock support and outlines the considerations that informed the design of the resulting OSE.