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New customers, new challenges, new structure: realigning support to survive massive growth

Published: 06 November 2005 Publication History

Abstract

The Community Network was established at Oregon State University as an efficiency measure to provide contractual desktop support. The move of information technology support functions from staff employed by individual departments to a centralized model resulted in immediate, across the board economies of scale. Nevertheless, operationally the Community Network has continued the "departmental" model of support. Currently there are four main desktop support groups and each supports, for the most part, several departments of similar functionality. While this model has traditionally afforded a high comfort level among supported users, recent growth indicates that it is not the most efficient or cost effective solution. Each group performs numerous redundant functions and over time, each group has developed their own set of operational procedures. The result of this "group independence" has made it difficult to respond to critical events with a quick re-shifting of technical staff. The proposed model is a phased revision from the current departmental model to a functional team based model, which eliminates many redundant functions. The first phase, centralization of the help desk and queue management functions, will help eliminate most redundancies allowing us to meet an ever-expanding customer base with fewer new staff hires. It will also provide us with a method to implement uniform operational procedures throughout the groups, giving us more flexibility in staff deployment. In the second phase the departmental teams will be restructured into functional desktop support, application support, and emergency response teams.

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  • (2008)Breaking through the beaver damProceedings of the 36th annual ACM SIGUCCS fall conference: moving mountains, blazing trails10.1145/1449956.1449996(125-132)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2008

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGUCCS '05: Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User services
November 2005
482 pages
ISBN:1595932003
DOI:10.1145/1099435
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 06 November 2005

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Author Tags

  1. decentralization/centralization
  2. desktop support
  3. help desk

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SIGUCCS Fall05
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Overall Acceptance Rate 123 of 170 submissions, 72%

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Cited By

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  • (2008)Breaking through the beaver damProceedings of the 36th annual ACM SIGUCCS fall conference: moving mountains, blazing trails10.1145/1449956.1449996(125-132)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2008

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