How We Deliver Our Desktop Support Services to Washington University in St. Louis the ITIL Way

Abstract

The Solutions Center service desk at Washington University provides desktop and server application support for the administrative departments and one school, the Brown School of Social Work. As part of a Shared Services initiative, we will be rebalancing the IT resources across the university, which will provide opportunities to leverage existing areas of innovation. In particular, our team has undergone ITIL-based organization and service design strategies. This paper will review how we use ITIL's Service Design methodology to frame our desktop computer service. I will describe how the processes, people, partners, and products combine to create a highly functioning support desk that provides call center and desk side support to over 2200 customers across campus. Additionally, I will describe how we organize our call center and field tech staff to deliver this service to meet the following metrics: 1. 95% of calls answered on the first attempt. 2. Average 12 seconds in queue. 3. No longer than 20 minute call duration. 4. Field Tech will respond to desk side within 20 minutes. 5. No tickets not updated in more than three days. In our environment, we target one technician to 150 users. With over 2200 users, we use organizational structure and processes to provide great service to those customers. We maintain well-known processes for on-boarding new staff, hardware refresh cycles, imaging and desktop engineering. I. Processes: on boarding, scheduled harware refresh, software licensing, desktop engineering, security, dynamic call center, inventory, and checklists. II. Products (tools): Web Help Desk ticketing system, transactional surveys, remote desktop tools, asset database, desktop automation, knowledgebase. III. People: staff - with an understanding of their role in the organization, staff rotations, training, coaching, customers IV. Partners: external vendors - software and hardware, internal application development teams, broaden scope of contractor usage, work with other university help desks. This organizational structure and the implementation of ITIL-based processes has given us the ability to provide a robust, customer-focused service that can scale up to incorporate areas of the school that are ready to move to this model.