Distributed Faculty Support

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services (OASIS) supports more than 1,200 faculty and 65 different academic departments. Although our centralized desktop support group has a great service reputation across the college, our Academic Technology Services (ATS) group has had a difficult time developing working relationships with a majority of faculty. Efforts to develop programmatic support approaches have been less than effective. The ATS group had developed into a centralized resource team composed of six specialists, each having expertise in only one or two specialty areas. This specialization had resulted in limited staff, redundancy, workload balance issues, and low morale. In addition, ATS staff were operating in a reactive mode, typically responding to faculty requests and interacting with only a small portion of the faculty. Finally, the ATS team was having a difficult time articulating its overall mission in a way that integrated well with the rest of the organization.