Office of the CIO Annual Achievement Report

2007 Achievements

User IT Support Initiative
Extend help desk hours and enhance the help desk web site to enable users to perform needed services without staff assistance.

Since 2004

Improved the web sites for classroom support; began and continue to emphasize flexibility in classroom designs to support active collaborative and social learning; developed procedures for notifying customers of planned service outages; migrated the university’s call centers to a new system; contracted with the School of Environmental and Natural Resources and University Libraries for infrastructure support; implemented VMWare throughout the administrative systems for more efficiency and flexibility; began the implementation of an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set of processes to integrate service desk functions; and made the following changes to the Remedy Action Request System: upgraded the infrastructure; extended Remedy access to many areas within CIO and the help desks in Human Resources, Purchasing, Receiving, and Stores; and used Remedy to manage distribution of “over the counter” site licensed software in Baker Systems.

Since 2007

• Opened the BuckeyeBar in Baker Systems for a new face-to-face approach for 8help technology support. Services include one-on-one technology consultation, laptop and wireless setup, Internet assistance, and virus removal.


• Relocated OSU Wireless-Cellular services to 512 Baker Systems Engineering, OIT’s location for “walk-in” customer support.


• Extended Remedy access to more areas within the Offices of the CIO and to many local support specialists, and expanded its use at the new help desk in Purchasing, Receiving, Stores, and Mail Services. Although Remedy started as a help ticket tool, it now supports many campus self-service applications, such as enabling 30,000 users to create e-mail accounts and 16,000 users to change passwords.


• Introduced a new service enabling local IT support specialists to register as site license software coordinators for their departments for easy management of Microsoft’s Vista and Office products and electronic downloads.


• Introduced automated, personalized instructions to OSU Medical Center employees for establishing university lastname.# and password and managing the delivery of university correspondence sent to their osu.edu e-mail address.


• Adopted several initiatives based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to improve user support. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library is a set of recommendations and best practices used in IT support that includes standard terminology and processes and functions for incident and problem management, and a service desk.


• Sponsored a Mobility Summit, in collaboration with Sprint, the university’s contract cellular provider, to highlight wireless technologies and applications that can enrich teaching and learning and enhance university administrative services.


• Developed portable support center kits so service desk agents can work remotely, also improving business continuity planning.


• Established a partnered support model liaison between the University Registrar and the Office of Information Technology.


• Hired a Senior IT Service Manager to coordinate IT support and customer service.


• Automated e-mail notifications to support staff for improved communications when the OIT systems status page is changed.


• Expanded 8help services by hiring full-time staff to cover weekend hours.


• Maintained more than 900 searchable knowledge base entries on the 8help web site that regularly appear in "top ten" hits for Google searches. The site receives more than two million hits per month and more than 24 million hits each fiscal year; of these, 107,253 are unique visitors per month.


• Established a Customer Expectation initiative to meet the 8help goal of improving response turnaround times to 30 minutes or less for e-mail requests for assistance.


• Integrated the former 2-UNIT telephone help line with the OIT 8-help call center line, for easier access to phone-in help for technology services; and rerouted 2-OHIO information calls to 2-UNIT/8-help whenever a caller is on hold for more than 60 seconds or the information operator queue reaches four or more callers, to more efficiently spread the workload and reduce caller wait time.


• Developed the UROCK! Online web portal that provides online education, information, social networking, and a call center community bulletin board for campus call centers using the OIT Customer Interaction Center System.