Documents Contributed by ECAR, Help Desk, and SLA

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. This session presents preliminary findings from the ECAR survey on prevailing IT help desk practices in the U.S. and Canada. Using standard assessments of help desk practice from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and others, principal investigator Mark Sheehan is developing a robust view of the state of the practice of service delivery, service support, and other IT help desk and IT practices.

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.