Presented at EDUCAUSE Annual Conferences, Support Services, and EDUCAUSE2007

ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a process-based framework for more effectively managing IT services. Although just emergent in higher education, it has been widely adopted in industry. It is surprisingly well-suited to higher education. This session will introduce ITIL and serves as a companion to another session describing Yale's experience implementing ITIL.

This session will explore distributed technology support from a results-oriented perspective. The discussion will take into consideration both central and distributed issues, as well as institutional and local issues, with the goal of identifying best practices for a varying number of distributed structures.

Far from being strangers to the power of search engines and knowledge bases, members of the academy increasingly demand sophistication, depth, breadth, and efficiency in retrieving localized technical support. In response, LSU developed GROK, a knowledge base with a mobile device interface, multimedia features, and a collaborative authoring environment.

Even the most seasoned IT professional needs constant training. How do you instill the love of lifelong learning in nontechnical support staff, at the same time moving them along the continuum toward more confidence and skill in technology support and troubleshooting? Empower them to learn, then teach them to teach other.

The University of Sao Paolo structured a set of mechanisms for effective IT governance. This poster will present the strategies and outcomes of our initiatives to manage our complex IT infrastructure and to address the growing needs for quality IT services.

Zane State College has implemented a project prioritization model for aligning limited IT resources and funding with institutional goals and objectives and client priorities. This presentation will describe the process and the project prioritization score sheet used to determine priority based on a holistic assessment of standard, client-focused impact criteria.

This session presents findings from the 2007 ECAR survey on IT help desk management in the U.S. and Canada. Using assessment methods derived from IT service management standards and the broader IT help desk literature, ECAR has developed a robust view of the state of the practice in this highly significant service area.

This meeting will provide a forum for discussing IT support for institutional research missions. The two broad categories of concern include support for research administration and IT support for research activities. Research administration support involves pre- and post-award support, interaction with federal grant systems, regulatory compliance, and intellectual property management. Supporting research activities includes centralized versus decentralized approaches, high-performance computing, advanced networking, and informatics, as well as enabling multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and interinstitutional work.

To achieve the USP computing Center's main goal of operational excellence in IT services provision, a strategic plan involving the entire organization was developed. This presentation will demonstrate how this strategic plan was used to drive IT services governance and enforce the operational excellence search.

The University at Albany and Davidson College will discuss the strategies they use to convey information about IT services to their respective user communities. Both institutions have developed a protocol for communicating about IT to non-technical audiences in user-friendly ways.