Attended

Presentations I Attended \n \n“The One” Project – University of Toronto Mississauga \n \nIn 2005 UofT Mississauga (part of University of Toronto) began “The One” Project. The goal was to enhance student services by providing one identity, one card, one phone number, and one helpdesk. UofT has a highly decentralized IT structure. For example they have 128 distinct email systems. A central IT department provides the network backbone and access to the internet. 60% of the IT expenditures are done at the divisional level. The Mississauga has a more centralized IT structure providing all IT services. \n \nStaff and students had to deal with two or more login ideas; UTMid was used by Mississauga and UTORid was used by the main campus. Mostly due to the budget the Mississauga campus began using the UTORid and the UofT’s mail system (UTORmail). One ID and one mail system allowed helpdesk’s from both facilities to provide support. Due to the available resources, the migration was handled in two steps: Students followed by faculty and staff. They were able to take the lessoned learned and ease the transition for faculty and staff. \n \nThe Mississauga Compute Services department managed 21,500 employee and student accounts. They had to deal with approximately 200 account name clashes in UofT system. \n \nThey could not afford to revamp their desktops or servers. Changes were tested in a virtual environment. In addition to the UTORid they needed to support Kerberos. Unix/Linux servers supported Kerberos with minimal modification. They considered running Linux desktops with Citrix providing access to Windows applications. One application did not work with Citrix so they settled on Microsoft’s Active Directory. \n \nThe change was advertised to students through email, flyers and notifications posted on the websites. When the changes were put in to place the Mississauga websites redirected students to the UofT websites where the new login information was supplied. \n \nIn addition to a single sign on they also implemented a speech recognition telephone system from Nuance. The University of Toronto’s ID cards system was adopted by the Mississauga campus which allowed students from each campus to grant/deny access and/or pay for services at each campus. \n \nLessons learned: \n•\tThey allocated enough resources; 5 Mississauga IT staff and 2 UofT staff. \n•\tClear communication and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances (e.g. getting nowhere with a vendor) was required. \n•\tNot all practices could be adapted in to existing systems. For example the home-built Mississauga Helpdesk tracking software was replaced by “Request Tracker”. Request Tracker is an open source helpdesk application which they tailored to their needs. \n•\tOne general phone number resulted in 93% of calls to be routed to the correct department \n•\tEffective project management allowed critical timelines to be met. \n \nThey feel that the ease of use of the systems has been improved. Other divisional IT groups are looking to adopt some of the pieces of the project (mostly the identity and authentication piece. \n \n \nReduce Response Time: Get “Hooked” on a Wiki - Valparaiso University \n \nThe IT department tackled the knowledge base issue. They were faced with the challenge of how to communicate the right information to internal and external customers. The goal was to improve service and also encourage the flow of information. \n \nThey began by evaluating the tools that they were using to facilitate the flow of information. They were using First Level Support (FLS) – a component that is included with HEAT as their knowledge base. Articles are stored and searched in a tree structure. The small plain text search window is not resizable and readily displays tree structure information rather than information that describes the article. The professionals and student employees needed something more robust, user friendly that was more interactive and not platform dependant. With the help of a Unix admin they decided on MediaWiki, an open source web based application that is also used by Wikipedia. \n \nMediaWiki provides search results by page name and content. It organizes results in what it thinks are the most likely matches. Pages can be bookmarked for future reference. \n \nUsing the wiki, staff can accumulate knowledge independently. They are able to offer feedback on existing pages. The wiki offers real time, account or system specific information such as account quotas and alias information. Helpdesk policies and procedures are available on the wiki in an indexed and searchable arrangement. Helpdesk staff first search the wiki when they do not know the answer to the problem. If the information does not exist, they create a page (without having knowledge of HTML) when they have the solution. \n \nMediaWiki includes moderation options that can prevent incorrect information from being published. The system can send email notifications to users or groups who are responsible for information. There is version control that allows moderators to view and compare past documents. They needed groups within the organization to have authority over their respective sections. Since the employees are encouraged to update the information it help to eliminate the bottleneck and free up the time of the employees who were previously responsible for updates to the knowledge base. \n \nFLS did not have the capability to monitor who was making changes so if all staff were allowed to make changes there was no way to keep unapproved information from being visible to staff. \n \nWhen they made the transition to MediaWiki they found that over 50% of their knowledge base articles were out date - requiring updates or obsolete. LDAP support was not included with MediaWiki out of the box but an extension was available. \n \nSince there is no built in way to hide information they have decided to run two instances of the wiki. One that is considered internal for staff (including students on the helpdesk) and the other that is viewable by the public. \n \n \nUnrelated to the wiki, they have been are continuing to use HEAT as their call tracking tool. Since the 90’s they’ve been using it pretty much out of the box. Their goal is to move towards ITIL and they have recently revamped their call classification from 1 tier to seven tier. Their new classification system aims to help prompt Helpdesk attendants with the common questions to ask – they want them to ask questions. E.g.: \n\t-Device (PC) \n\t\t-Person (Student or Staff) \n\t\t\t-Application Name \n\t\t\t\t-Do they have access, corruption, etc. \n \nThe overhaul for their classification system took approximately six weeks. \n \n \nAmerican ITIL – Hobart and William Smith Colleges \n \nITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It is a set of concepts and techniques for managing IT infrastructure, development and operations. In other words it provides a set of best practices. Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) explained how ITIL is influencing how they handle incident management, problem management, service level agreements (SLA), operating level agreements (OLA), creation of metrics, and the beginning stages of how to design a service catalog. \n \nITIL can be considered a framework that can be adapted to suit the needs of an organization. Published benefits included: \n•\tReduced costs \n•\tImproved customer satisfaction due to a more professional approach to service delivery \n•\tImproved productivity \n•\tImproved use of skills and experience \n \nHobart and William Smith Colleges is selectively choosing which components of the framework to use. \n \nThe best practices that make up ITIL are documented in a series of books which are updated as the concepts evolve. The five core titles are service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement. \n \nThe service strategy explains how service management should be designed, developed and implemented. \n \nService design targets the design and development of services offered and how the services will be managed. A service catalog (either a database structured document) lists what services are offered and includes information such as deliverables, prices, contact points, and how to order. Hobart and William Smith Colleges currently has a service catalog in its early stages in the form of a excel spreadsheet. Operation level agreements document define the workflow and procedures for the IT services department and other departments within the organization. HWS does not publish their OLAs. A service level agreement is an agreement between the IT services department and the customer. SLAs basically define what a customer can expect in terms of timeframe and deliverables but also serve to communicate the IT department’s expectations in terms of required information and how much notice is required. HWS publishes their SLAs. \n \nService transition is essentially another name for change management. The aim is to control the lifecycle of all changes and prevent disruption of other services. \n \nService operation refers to the delivery of support services to ensure they are of value for the customer and the service provider. Incident management is responsible for managing the lifecycle of all reported incidents. HWS is implementing an enterprise information system that will provide college constituents with information tools and processes that support a broad set of mission critical operations. In Computing Services and other departments in AU we use HEAT to l

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