Since the last major update, the SSD pilot project has made significant progress toward implementing the vision articulated by the ITST SSD committee. Project team members have been sent to training on the CA Service Desk product, allowing them to guide the rest of the project team in the configuration. Two on site consultant visits took place in July and November, and were used to validate and checkpoint the project team's work. The software has been installed, and the project team is currently applying the necessary configuration changes, with a goal of presenting the proposed system configuration to the campus in March.

The project team is currently developing the project plan and estimating the resource requirements. The new tools will not require IT units to provide additional modes of support directly.

Post pilot project work includes expanding the SSD toolset to include modules where necessary, and standardized workflow and reporting/dashboards.

The Shared IT Service Desk team's report is final and recommends how to seamlessly integrate IT resources, and provides a set of best practices, processes and toolsets.

The report has been finalized and the chair will be submitting the report to the CIO’s office.

Team leader Daniel Arrasjid provided an update on the project team's progress, which includes a final recommendation of selecting the preferred vendor's service desk product for implementation of a university-wide service desk application.

In February, the SITSD team hosted a series of three selected vendor demonstrations for product evaluation. A follow-up evaluation tool, composed of questions that enabled participants to compare vendor features, yielded a 20 percent response rate, providing useful information toward selection recommendations. The team will consider how well the product meets the technical and functional requirements, implementation and licensing costs, as well as campus feedback from the vendor demonstrations.

In early February, the Shared IT Service Desk team hosted three vendor demonstrations, in which about 80 IT professionals attended. Through a survey tool, feedback is being gathered that will assist the team in making its recommendation. A report on the team’s progress and next steps will be presented at the Town Hall on March 7, 2008.

Vendors were asked to give responses to the RFP as a description of proposed solutions, a list of product services and pricing sheets that included alternative procurement solutions such as up front purchase versus growth over time by need. The top contender products included BMC Remedy Action Request System, CA Unicenter Service Desk, and HP OpenView ServiceCenter. The next step in the RFP review is vendor demonstration days where vendors are given an opportunity to demonstrate their product and answer questions in public sessions open to the campus IT community.

A successfully compiled Request for Proposal resulted in responses from those organizations identified by Gartner as the ‘major players’ in the industry, reported Nancy Smyth and Daniel Arrasjid, project leaders.  For several days in February, 2008, selected vendors will be presenting and demonstrating their products, open to the campus.  Specific details for these sessions will be announced via listserv and on the IT Shared Service Desk  project page.

The Shared IT Service Desk project team is awaiting the responses to the RFP from the vendors it was sent to and will coordinate vendor demonstrations accordingly, stated Daniel Arrasjid, project leader.

At a critical point in the project, its vision just about complete, a main concern of attendants is related to the project scope.

Evaluation criteria are being finalized for the RFP process that a sub team is currently drafting. One priority is ensuring that vendor solutions avoid extensive customization to achieve the evaluation criteria.

Evaluation criteria are being finalized for the RFP process that a sub team is currently drafting. One priority is ensuring that vendor solutions avoid extensive customization to achieve the evaluation criteria.

The Service Catalog subgroup is analyzing and finalizing the survey data received (from the IT Node Managers). A series of subgroups have been created and will meet regularly through the summer. The Functional List and Features subgroup will be engaging in vendor demonstrations shortly. The Customers subgroup is focusing on customer needs and other customer-related issues, the Vision subgroup will define how this implementation fits into the larger UB, and the Implementation subgroup will execute the project plan.

The primary goal for the Shared IT Service Desk Project is a service desk and customer support model that seamlessly integrates IT resources across campus. The new service desk should create the perception of a unified service delivery and should serve as a single point of initial contact supported by knowledge management and customer relationship tools. The project objective includes looking for opportunities to free up capacity and improve quality of service.

The team completed its work on the development of a services catalog framework which provides a common definition of customer facing services. Using this framework, the team developed and launched a survey tool to collect additional information from IT support staff to obtain information necessary to build a service catalog, obtain sufficient information for identifying opportunities, and for developing requirements for a shared service desk. The survey was launched on Feb 14th at a Node Director's meeting. Survey results will be analyzed in March

The team has been meeting regularly discussing service cataloging, and recently spent time talking with node directors about what would be a first pass at organizing services into a catalog taxonomy. A survey is planned to be sent within the next month to the IT Support community in an effort to gather more details about departmental service offerings. The team is well aware of the varying levels and types of services offered, and is looking to attain information that will identify opportunities where efficiencies can be created.

The Shared IT Service Desk project leader Terri Mangione, Senior Associate Vice Provost for Student Academic Records and Financial Services and team member Mark Ferguson, Manager, Help Desk Consultant were provided the opportunity to provide correct context to the scope and goals of the project to attendants at a round table discussion.

A taxonomy to catalog shared IT Service Desk activities was developed by the project team and presented to a meeting of IT service managers for discussion. The project team will begin to use the taxonomy to catalog services with the intention of identifying opportunities in which processes or people in support of common services can be shared.

The IT Shared Service Desk Team is making progress focusing on two major issues - building a service catalog and service desk support software options.

The team will be developing a Service Catalog within the month as the first agenda item. The project team is beyond its initial forming stages, and work agenda has been set: explore shared ticketing systems, including asset management software, and decide what types of services would be included in a shared service desk. The service desk is envisioned as a single point of customer contact that when called workers will identify the caller then understand, via an automated system, which services support the caller and how they work for that individual

The IT Shared Service Desk Team recently acquired a new leader. The newly appointed project leader is Nancy J. Smyth, Dean of Social Work. July 25th was the date of their first official meeting under new leadership.