October 06, 2014

IT is under construction

The IT department is undergoing a reorganization in order to address the changing role of technology in higher education.

Associate Vice President and Chief Information Officer Adam Buchwald will discuss the major changes in Information Technology at the this week’s Administrative Assembly

The IT department is undergoing a reorganization in order to address the changing role of technology in higher education. This process is a long and involved one, so please have patience with IT as we shift responsibilities around—our hope is that the end result is better for the college both in ease of access to services and in better communication and transparency of IT processes.  

To that end, we are creating a single point of service contact with a new consolidated Service Desk. In the past there were several places to go to get help: the Help Desk, the Instructional Media Services desk, the main IT office, your favorite IT staff member you saw buying a snack at the Bon, etc.  With a single point of contact, we’re hoping to make it easy to know who to call to get the help and services you need. We have hired Service Desk Manager Steve McCurry, who will be overseeing both student workers and full-time staff in the service desk, tracking your requests and ensuring a high level of service, as well as improving accountability and communication.  

We are also implementing a Project Management Office (PMO) in order to better track, prioritize and communicate about our many IT projects. This office will work in coordination with IT and institutional leadership in order to ensure that projects are more transparent, well documented, and in line with strategic goals for the institution. Our PMO will also be able to work with other project managers on campus in order to better coordinate schedules and communication.

With the development of the service desk and the PMO, we will allow some of our staff to focus exclusively on educational technology, with an entire IT division dedicated to assisting faculty in better integration and development of curricular technology. We are also consolidating our technical support staff into one operations division, allowing for better coordination of our resources and skills.

There’s no denying that technology has changed over the last 15 years, both in ubiquity and complexity. We hope that restructuring our staff and their responsibilities will help us meet the needs of today and better prepare us to tackle the challenges of tomorrow.  

We’ll be announcing the grand opening of the service desk as well as the other changes later this fall—keep an eye out on our website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed for more information!

This content originally appeared in the fall 2014 issue of Information Technology’s department newsletter IT Unplugged 12.0.