Copyright 1997 CAUSE. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 20, Number 2, Summer 1997, pp. 24-30. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: [email protected]
by Richard M. Kesner
At Babson College, as at many other institutions, most of the College's services are computer mediated, creating a demand for full support coverage by the help desk, which handles as many as 1,500 calls a month. To meet this demand and satisfy varied groups of users, Babson has devised a series of service delivery models tailored to each group's needs.
Many colleges and universities are now migrating to client/server networks and increasingly complex and sophisticated information technology (IT) environments. Some are redesigning business processes and course delivery to operate on the Internet. While each of these efforts no doubt possesses its own unique attributes, they all share some common challenges. In the first place, client/server technologies are extremely difficult and costly to implement and maintain. Their initiation places great strains on the end user trying to adapt and apply these new tools in the classroom, lab, office, or residence hall. The ongoing support of information technologies also places a considerable strain on the institution's IT team as the complexity of the environment grows and its points of failure multiply. Ultimately, the move to a new IT architecture, be it curriculum- or market-driven, brings with it demands for a greater investment in the human and financial resources required for its development and maintenance.
This situation is further complicated by the media hype concerning the ease of transition to and the major paybacks from the move to a highly decentralized, World Wide Web-based, information-rich work environment. The expectation among the users of these systems is quite high, and their tolerance for network failure or delay is correspondingly low. As the managers of information technology resources, CAUSE members are no doubt sympathetic to the needs and fears of their customers. The question remains, what can be done to address user requirements in a period of rapid change, growing use, greater complexity, and constrained resources?
In the view of the author, any institution's response to this set of issues must revolve in part around the effective and efficient delivery of support services. These services should address network and information technology product failures, the sundry questions and problems of customers, and the overall enablement of campus business processes. To this end, any successful model will involve the greater community of users working in conjunction with the campus information technology professionals. Together, they will share responsibility for training and problem solving, for managing external third-party service providers, and, in short, for establishing a multi-tiered support strategy in keeping with their needs and limited resources.
This article examines the various potential components of a higher education information technology service and support model and how these pieces are being deployed at Babson College to address particular institutional and user requirements. While the ideas presented here reflect the particular experiences of Babson, they draw upon dozens of other examples from both private and public sector organizations. It is the author's hope that readers will build upon the following examples in fashioning solutions for their own organizational settings.
In 1990, Babson College began its transformation from a modest to an extensive user of information technology, where approximately 70 percent of all work is computer-mediated, and where both administrative services and teaching have their own Web-based components.1 The Babson campus includes some forty-eight buildings, more than 6,000 network nodes, over 1,500 computer workstations and associated peripherals, and a user community of approximately 4,000. Users have access to Microsoft's Windows 95 and Office, Lotus Notes, Netscape, various HTML tools, electronic mail, file and print services, the library system, CD-ROM libraries, statistical tools, database tools, online information services, and sundry other College information resources. All of these products are delivered through a now five-year-old client/server network running under Banyan Vines and Microsoft NT. By and large this environment is stable, robust, scaleable, and otherwise unremarkable.
As a community of users, Babson is also somewhat typical. The College's student population includes 1,700 undergraduates, an equivalent number of full-time and evening graduate students, nearly 200 faculty, and 300 or so administrative employees. Most class work involves the use of information technology by both faculty and students. In addition IT-enabled collaborative teamwork plays an important part in the Babson educational experience. Classrooms are equipped with computer workstations and multi-media, audio/visual projection systems. Increasingly classrooms are wired to the seat so that students may bring their laptop computers to class and plug into the campus network.
When the campus network first became available, usage was modest, educational applications were few, and IT resources appeared to be in balance with user needs. Indeed, the College's chief information officer spent a great deal of his time marketing network services and the possibilities afforded by emerging information technologies to a largely disinterested audience. However, with the emergence of the World Wide Web as an important teaching/learning tool, these circumstances changed dramatically. The demand for greater capacity -- processor speeds, storage, bandwidth, and so forth -- as well as for new services began to skyrocket. The College IT team's ability to deliver services soon began to lag behind user requirements, especially in the area of support.
Two independent trends encouraged these developments. On the one hand, in 1994, Babson adopted a new customer service paradigm and began to reengineer all of its student administrative services.2 As part of this effort, Babson's IT team introduced collaborative (Lotus Notes) and workflow management (Action Technologies' Action WorkFlow) software into the environment.3 Concurrently, the College's reengineering teams began to select and implement new transaction software, including admission, student information, student billing, student advising, financial management, and purchasing systems. On the other hand, the faculty began to turn in increasing numbers to the campus network and the Internet to deliver assignments, to conduct teaching activities, and to pursue professional and research interests. These two clusters of activities -- administrative system changes and the greater use of IT in and outside of the classroom -- raised a host of service and support problems.
Response time became an immediate issue as the College installed high-end client/server applications, prompting the move to Windows 95 and Pentium-based client machines. The demand for Office 95 followed immediately thereafter. The coordinated installation of these products became an issue, as did the fine-tuning of the network. The associated need for added training, documentation, and expanded help desk services also accompanied these changes.
Similarly, while Babson provided Internet access for all of those on campus, off-campus access emerged as yet another pressing need. Such a service was of particular interest to our faculty and non-resident students who wanted electronic mail, file services, and Web access from their homes, off-campus offices, or from wherever they might be traveling. The intensity and immediacy of this particular set of demands took the College IT team somewhat by surprise. Furthermore, an effective solution to address this requirement proved difficult and time-consuming to design and implement.
Perhaps most importantly, network availability and reliability became (and remain) major service and support issues. As students, faculty, and administrators came to rely more heavily on the College's IT environment in conducting their daily work, their tolerance for interruptions evaporated even as their expectations for expanded support grew by leaps and bounds. For example, between 1991 and 1996, help desk operations grew from forty to seventy-six hours per week and from a staffing level of two to three full-time-equivalents in response to demand. Many customers now want "24x7" coverage (twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week). Similarly, the weekly network shutdowns from 10:00 p.m. Thursday to 8:00 a.m. Friday for maintenance now proved unacceptable. Steps are being taken to move downtime to Friday evenings/Saturday mornings.
Finally, "availability" from the user's perspective does not differentiate between the local IT environment and the many interconnecting pieces between that user and College services. It is, therefore, not sufficient that the network "work right" all of the time, but it must also operate in conjunction with external telecommunication networks and Internet service providers (ISPs). These necessary linkages have certainly complicated the lives of the College IT team in meeting customer needs, especially when the users themselves have no sense of the interrelated complexities and uncertainties of an Internet-focused IT environment.
To address emerging IT needs, Babson College established an Information Technology and Services Division (ITSD) in 1990 under the aegis of a chief information officer (CIO). Over the years this organization has evolved in line with the use of IT on campus.4 During that same period, the financial and human resources devoted to service and support have grown dramatically. The current list of offerings includes:
The help desk operates Monday through Thursday from 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Sunday from 3:00 to 11:00 p.m. year round. Customers are asked to call the help desk (extension "HELP" ) from on or off campus for any IT-related problem or need. Typical help desk calls include questions about the use of hardware and software, requests for on-site service support and problem solving, and the placement of formal work orders for new/expanded IT products and services. Help desk operators (three during the day and at least one in the evenings and on weekends) -- all professionals5 -- triage calls, and whenever possible address the customer's needs over the phone. The College help desk handles somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 calls each month, of which 60 to 80 percent can be addressed immediately by a help desk representative.
The majority of these calls concern questions about Microsoft Windows 95 and Office products, campus electronic mail, or remote access services. Internet-related calls are typically forwarded to library Information Services Consultants for handling. A small portion of the remaining help desk traffic is project oriented, generating work orders. These are directed, usually via electronic mail, to the appropriate party responsible for action on the particular request. The help desk serves as a clearinghouse. All work tickets are logged into a Lotus Notes database and tracked until they are closed. Help desk personnel regularly call customers to follow up on open work orders.6
The final portion of help desk calls involves the need to dispatch IT personnel to a user location or to the data center to fix a particular problem. These services include everything from the clearing of printer paper jams and the replacement of ink jet cartridges to the rebuilding of client desktops or network server loads. Dispatched support operates Monday through Thursday from 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., and on Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. A beeper service is in place on all week nights and weekends when the help desk is closed, but this arrangement provides service for emergencies only, such as a full network shutdown or problems that prevent class delivery.
In general, the help desk and dispatching services have met with wide customer acceptance and satisfaction. Emergencies, especially those affecting classroom and student computer lab activities, are addressed as top priorities.
Initially, communication failures did occur between the help desk and dispatch. To remedy this problem, the help desk was reconstituted as a Network Services Support Team that includes the staffs who install cabling, install and service client machines, manage the network, build the servers, and answer the help desk lines. All members of this team work help desk shifts. Increasingly team members are cross-training one another, sharing their expertise. As a result, fewer problems have fallen through the cracks, and overall response time in addressing customer problems has improved.
Nevertheless, the network team model is in and of itself insufficient. In the first place, our customers are demanding more extended hours of coverage than we currently provide. Second, the help desk cannot always handle the volume of calls during peak periods. Third, by its very nature, the help desk is reactive rather than proactive. Fourth, the help desk is expensive and the College cannot afford to continue to grow the service, even if that is what our customers might want. Finally, some College constituencies, including faculty and residential students, need different types of support than those afforded by a help desk design. The question, therefore, became one of how to more effectively leverage the help desk investment to better serve customers without adding to already burdensome operating costs.
In brief, Babson has devised a series of tailored responses based upon the characteristics and circumstances of specific user groups. For College administrative units, the IT team established a Technology Specialists program. In conjunction with human resources and the institution's management team, the CIO identified positions within each operating unit where the job description also included responsibility for local IT support. IT personnel next developed a special training curriculum for those in these positions. The basic rationale behind the program was that the IT team would train employees who would in turn serve as local experts in their respective departments. The concept was generally accepted, and when a computer virus broke out on campus, the Technology Specialists (TechSpecs) proved themselves invaluable in helping IT address the problem.
On the other hand, the program has had its problems. The development and maintenance of the training effort proved more difficult than anticipated and required additional annual funding. Attendance at training by Technology Specialists was sporadic either because the Specialists themselves did not believe that they could afford to take time away from their "real" work or because (as was often the case) their supervisors did not want them spending time on IT training when there was work to do. Even those who attended training and were enthusiastic now find themselves torn between the need to complete their daily work and their new responsibility to help co-workers through their IT problems. The Technology Specialist program nevertheless continues at Babson College with mixed results.
On the student side of the house, Babson has instituted the Residential Technology Associates program, comparable to the Technology Specialists program. Residential Technology Associates (RTAs) are students employed to work in College residence halls Sunday through Thursday evenings. In effect, they are on call to their fellow students at those times when the help desk is closed. Teams of two students each are assigned to designated buildings. Their phone numbers are listed on bulletin boards in the residence halls, and students call them for help.
To date, the College has invested little in this group other than paying their salaries. Typically, they are highly proficient, self-taught technologists. If they cannot solve a particular student's problem, the Associates will direct the student to the help desk for assistance during normal business hours or to the College computer store or some other appropriate third party. Students like the service but complain that there are not enough Associates to go around. The Associates themselves admit (as does the IT team) that they need more training to be effective, a shortcoming the College will correct in the coming academic year.
Faculty pose special support challenges. While they use the help desk, they are not inclined to attend IT training sessions or read documentation. Some of these customers employ the help desk as their primary training tool, an application for which it was never intended. At the same time, faculty departments do not have staff that may be assigned to the TechSpecs program. Furthermore, faculty IT needs are often at a more sophisticated level than those of the College's administrative personnel. This group of users therefore required a different support strategy.
To date, Babson has developed three specific responses to this need, and all have met with great success. In the first instance, the College established the position of faculty IT coordinator, a role that reports to the academic deans. This person is an advocate for faculty IT needs and proactively seeks their input in such areas as classroom design, the selection of audio/visual and instructional technology hardware, the purchase of course software, and the assessment of IT team service delivery. As a technologist who is independent of the College's IT division, the coordinator serves as a liaison between Babson's academic programs and its technology support team. Both the faculty and the IT team have benefited from the facilitation and fact gathering conducted by this individual.
In terms of day-to-day support, ITSD also provides a peripatetic help desk staffer who is on call to the faculty and who travels from office to office solving problems and providing focused, personalized training and support. Finally, in the case of our new graduate building with all of its high-tech classrooms and equipment, ITSD has assigned a full-time technologist to support daily operations. Both of these employees carry beepers and are backed up by the help desk and the other members of the Network Support team.
In terms of training programs, the IT team offers from six to twelve sessions each month, typically of one-and-one-half to three hours in length. These sessions are scheduled at night or during the day depending upon the focus audience and take place in one of Babson's fully equipped computer classrooms. At the end of each month, ITSD posts next month's scheduleof offerings.7 To register for any course, the user employs an online registration system. The process is entirely automated. While ITSD coordinates these activities, third-party software training companies deliver the actual courses. However, IT personnel survey all class attendees on their satisfaction and closely monitor vendor performance. From time to time, the IT team also runs customized programs based upon specific customer requirements. All courses are offered at no charge to College employees and students.8
In addition to formal course offerings, the IT team provides a series of online tutorials for Microsoft Office products. The division also issues weekly information (hot tip) sheets based upon the types of questions raised by help desk users. From time to time, Network Support has also sponsored brown bag IT luncheon discussions, but these have been discontinued due to a lack of customer interest.
The College publishes two lines of documentation products in two different venues. The first of these products, the Computer and Library Survival Guide, is a single volume that serves as a compendium of information about Babson College's IT and library offerings, including basic instruction in the use of Microsoft products and the Internet. The IT team issues the Survival Guide each summer in hard copy. It is sent to new employees and incoming students free of charge and is available to all others at cost through the college bookstore. The team also maintains and continuously updates a Web-based version of the Survival Guide accessed through the College's home page. To supplement the Guide, the College publishes a series of customized booklets that complement training course offerings, including guides to Windows 95, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. As with the Survival Guide these booklets are published on an annual basis in their hard copy versions and are free to course attendees. Their Web versions are updated regularly and made available online.
In summary, the IT team has provided a wide range of support services to the Babson College community. The underlying philosophy behind the design of these services is two-fold. On the one hand, IT support seeks to provide its customers with "one stop shopping" through the help desk for the resolution of IT-related problems. On the other hand, campus technologists seek to facilitate the use of the College's IT capabilities through specifically tailored documentation, training, and support.
At the present time, considerable Babson resources are devoted to these objectives with mixed results. Furthermore, the demand by our customers for more and better services has outstripped the institution's capacity for the foreseeable future.
Given the competing demands for the institution's limited resources, one is obliged to raise two questions: First, can Babson afford to continue or even increase its current level of investment in IT support? Second, can the IT team find ways to leverage its existing support resources more effectively, deriving greater benefit out of current funding levels? Clearly, the current model must change. In all likelihood the College, like many of its sister institutions, will need to limit or even curtail some IT services. For its part the IT team must certainly find ways to spend what it has more effectively, perhaps providing its customers with the option of adding to Babson's basic IT support offerings on a pay-as-you-consume basis. The drivers for change within this context include:
In response to these change drivers, Babson College is initiating a new service and support model. This model combines some of the most successful elements of the current state with some fresh approaches to service delivery. The goal of this new service delivery system is to decentralize field support, to outsource the support of standard software applications, and to retain as centralized high-level, network-wide problem solving.
The envisioned model combines elements of the existing help desk operation with the relocation of technical personnel into user areas, and the provision of some services through external, third-party providers. This approach appears to be superior to the status quo, which would at any rate require additional resources just to maintain the current level of performance. The basic elements of the design are as follows.
Help desk calls will be triaged through an automated phone attendant. For example, by pressing "one," the caller is routed to a third-party service that will provide 24x7 support for those types of questions.9 By pressing "two," the caller is immediately connected to a help desk dispatcher who will process the caller's request and possibly dispatch the appropriate support person to the caller's location. By pressing "three," the caller is immediately connected with a help desk person who can deal with the caller's problem.
At the heart of the new service delivery model resides the concept of a peripatetic "help desk" support staff who are assigned to and reside in specific geographical locations at least part of each work week. Their role is to address user needs face to face as dispatched by centralized help desk personnel, but also to "roam the halls" proactively seeking to assist, train, and develop technology users. From our experiences to date, this approach to service delivery is more effective and efficient, meeting with broad, enthusiastic user acceptance.
The help desk itself will retain current operating hours during Fall and Spring semesters, but for the rest of the year, the help desk will operate from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday with no weekend hours of operation. At any time when the help desk is not in operation and an emergency arises, the help desk line will provide a beeper number for on-call services.
The help desk will be staffed by at least one ITSD professional at all times, supplemented by one or more student employees (typically RTAs) as the volume of calls dictates.
In its entirety, this model should provide more timely, focused, and personalized service in the field as well as informal opportunities for user technology training and development. Even so, it is clearly a compromise solution and will never satisfy all user expectations. For this effort to succeed, the community as a whole must come to recognize that in balance this model gets the institution closer to the desired state.
On the plus side, the new model regularly places IT experts during peak periods of use in classroom buildings and offices across campus. They will be on hand to witness and immediately correct problems. They will also seek out users, gather data on their needs and problems, and bring this intelligence back to the IT team with an aim towards a more proactive stance towards addressing customer requirements. Lastly and most importantly, the envisioned arrangement will afford a greater level of collaboration and resource sharing among all of those key to the use of IT on campus -- users, local experts (in the departments), and IT support personnel.
On the minus side, these changes come with a modest cost. The College will incur added expenses as it increases the number of Residential Technology Associates (approximately $6,000 per RTA per year) and to compensate those professionals working on network maintenance Friday evenings (release time equivalent to one full-time technologist or approximately $45,000 per year including benefits). Those members of the community who choose phone support for standard software (such as Microsoft Office) will be obliged to pay as they go or ITSD must be given an amount to cover their usage of this added service (estimated at $50,000$60,000 per year).10 Again, it should be noted that maintenance of the status quo would also require at least two added FTEs just to maintain the current level of service. Going forward, the help desk will be staffed partly by students but supervised by an IT professional. New help desk software will further leverage the expertise of the full-time staff to assist student workers.
Finally, to achieve the service objectives outlined above, the College community as a whole must come to realize that they all bear a responsibility to become more conversant in the information technologies required in the day-to-day execution of their jobs. The College's human resources department must incorporate IT competencies into job descriptions and College hiring profiles. In addition, more formal and comprehensive IT training must become an integral part of any new employee orientation program. For its part, the IT team must continue to improve its training programs, online tutorials, and various forms of documentation, but none of these will prove effective if the user fails to take advantage of them. In brief, no service model will meet its objectives without the recognition by the campus community that they must take responsibility for their own development as knowledge workers. One may argue that the design presented here makes better use of limited institutional resources. But the success of the effort rests on our ability as a community to build a culture around self-reliance and collaboration.
Babson College is now in the process of implementing this new support structure across the institution. The model itself has met with broad community support, recognizing both the need for further change and the need to limit the growth of expenditures on IT support. The peripatetic help desk model has met with overwhelming success, allowing more timely and focused support, and just-in-time user training. The discussion about mutual responsibility for campus information technologies continues.
1 For a current description of Babson College's Web-commerce strategy, see Richard M. Kesner, "ViDi-Otm (View-It and Do-It Online): An Approach to Internet Commerce in a Higher Education Setting," Journal of Computing in Higher Education 9/1(Fall 1997): 3-24.
2 For details, see Richard M. Kesner, "Reengineering Babson College," Journal of Computing in Higher Education 7/1 (Fall 1995): 94-117.
3 Richard M. Kesner, "Employing Groupware in Business Process Redesign: Action Technology's Action WorkFlow," Center for Quality Management Journal 5/2 (Fall 1996): 5-14.
4 For a brief history of the evolution of the ITSD organization, see Richard M. Kesner, "The Library as Information Center: A 'Utility' Model for Information Resource Management and Support," Library Trends 42
5 Prior to the establishment of the Information Technology and Services Division, Babson primarily employed students in support roles, including the repair and maintenance of client machines. As the College moved towards client/server, this arrangement proved impractical. In the first place, students did not possess the necessary technical skills. Secondly, students departed at breaks and vacation periods, but the work remained. Thirdly, IT support was not their first priority. Getting a degree was understandably more important to them. The College therefore concluded that it would employ IT professionals going forward, a policy that has been modified only by the addition of Residential Technology Specialists.
6 Given the volume of help desk activity, the IT team has outgrown its current help desk software and is now looking for a commercially available database product that will capture problem and solution information with a modicum of artificial intelligence to support the help desk operator's search
7 It should also be noted that the IT team does not provide training and support for business-process-based application software, such as the College's registration or financial aid management systems. Instead, we rely upon the vendors of those software products working in conjunction with Babson system owners to provide all training and support for the limited number of Babson employees using these systems. The IT team's focus in training is on the generic tools used by the entire community, such as electronic mail, Internet browsers, and office automation software.
8 Students typically receive their IT training through regular course work where IT competencies are a by-product of the larger course design. Students may also attend IT training courses as space permits. From time to time, the IT team has offered training sessions for student groups upon request and on a few rare occasions, has sold surplus classroom space to outside parties.
9 The College will continue to offer online training, online help, class training and documentation at no cost to the College's operating units. It should also be noted that the new Web-based front-end screens and forms of our reengineered processes only come with online support and documentation.
10 These figures are driven by the scope of coverage (i.e., 24x7 or less) and the volume of activity. The author would recommend a general fund managed by the institution's IT unit for this purpose where a senior technologist could monitor community usage and proactively address emerging needs through other, less costly means.
Richard M. Kesner ([email protected]) currently serves as Babson College's Chief Information Officer, responsible for all aspects of the College's use of information technologies, including computer services, media services, voice/data communications, library services and resources, museums, and archives. He is also president and senior consultant for RMK Associates, a management, strategic planning, and MIS consulting firm.
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