Mehran Basiratmand, Chief Technology Officer at Florida Atlantic University, was featured in The Edvocate where he describes how FAU is using a single platform to streamline the delivery of IT services and meet the needs of stakeholders more effectively.
By Mehran Basiratmand, Chief Technology Officer at Florida Atlantic University
How often does this happen at your institution: Your IT support team receives what you think is a simple request—but it turns out to be more complicated than you first thought?
For instance, a faculty member or administrator might request a new network drop for his office. This is typically a simple cable installation that can be handled by the IT staff on that campus. But in the process of installation, maybe the technician realizes that the switch has no more ports available, so now a switch upgrade is needed. Or maybe all of the switches in that building are actually outdated—and suddenly a simple request for a single port could lead to a comprehensive network upgrade.
At Florida Atlantic University, we are working on an initiative that will make it very easy to escalate a support ticket into a full-blown project. In our new system, all IT requests—whether they are simple service requests or projects that require multiple IT departments—will be funneled through a single, unified platform to improve efficiency. We are excited to create this next generation of IT service, which will help us meet the needs of stakeholders more effectively.
The initiative actually began about three years ago, when we decided to replace our old ticketing system because it wasn’t meeting our needs. We wanted to be able to track our service response times and other key performance indicators (KPIs) so that we could set goals and continuously improve, and the product we were using did not have very sophisticated reporting capabilities. It also was not browser adaptive, so our users could not easily create a support ticket from a mobile device. After an extensive evaluation process, we chose the TeamDynamix (TDX) service platform because it met all of our requirements.