Service Delivery and Support

To run business, operations, and support aspects of an enterprise IT organization, there are many applications that are necessary. The complexity of controlling changes, service levels, and costs would be impossible without these tools and processes. The goal is to provide technologies, tools, and processes that significantly enhance the efficiency and quality of central IT services.

In pursuit of this vision, quality should continuously be tracked by direct service metrics, including operational monitoring and customer feedback. Likewise, efficiency should be tracked by performance in execution of services rendered and by cost management for service delivery. Requests for IT support across the entire campus will be tracked and routed with the minimum of delay; these support requests will be consolidated across campus to increase efficiency. Rich repositories of support information — from descriptive summaries to detailed FAQs and user guides — will be available both to IT support personnel as well as directly available to end users. Additional information resources will be delivered via enhanced online training technologies. IT Services will leverage a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to track and anticipate the service needs of clients.

There will be fully integrated management control over changes in the application and system environments, and tracking of the real-time health of services. All services and their dependencies will be understood and monitored in order to rapidly determine the root cause of service disruptions. Monitoring and trend metrics data will be used to anticipate service degradation. Analytical insight into financial, operational, resource utilization, and support metrics will be available via a reporting infrastructure that has access to consolidated data fed from all relevant sources.

Technologies in this section

Goals

  • Consolidate the many service desk functions across campus; better integrate and streamline tools for support on campus.
  • Fully integrate knowledge management tools with web infrastructure, service desk, and issue tracking systems; integrate search across support information.
  • Integrate change management, service monitoring, and the configuration management database (CMDB).
  • Use trend analysis data to plan capacity and anticipate and prevent service degradation.
  • Build a master datastore fed from various sources of operational, financial, and resource capacity data; deploy reporting tool for the purposes of cross-functional and trend analysis.
  • Deploy CRM tool to track and correlate the broad client IT needs and opportunities; IT Services should use CRM tools to support IT across the Stanford community.
  • Maintain a web-based workflow for the creation and maintenance of up-to-date service information documents; provide version preview and commenting features within the same system used for online publication.
  • Monitor web site usage statistics to inform the planning and assess the value of support information and other documentation.
  • Deploy project management tool for IT Services in support of more centralized project management planning and reporting.
  • Integrate the systems used for documentation and support information with those used for ordering and billing (rates).
  • Investigate cross-functional reporting analytics and business intelligence tools.
  • Explore Software as a Service (SaaS)-based CRM systems which integrate well with enterprise infrastructure.
  • Leverage federated search across multiple online support content sources.
  • Monitor the development of OpenSocial API for flexible web UI development.

Roadmap

  • Identify data sources for master datastore; design database.
  • Acquire or leverage existing reporting tool for cross-functional analytical reporting.
  • Pilot dashboard metrics site based on OpenSocial API.
  • Find well-suited opportunities to consolidate decentralized Service Desk functions on campus.
  • Pilot CRM solution.
  • Pilot centrally maintained project management tool.

Measures of success

  • Cost of managing business reduced.
  • Reduced duration of open support issues; increased client satisfaction in issue resolution.
  • Ability to easily perform analytical reports across multiple data sources.
  • Client service profile information available to track interactions, needs.
  • Monitoring and metrics dashboard available for both IT Services staff and clients.