INSTITUTION:
Indiana University
PROJECT TITLE:
The Leveraged Support Model for
Information Technology Support
PRIMARY CONTACT:
Brian D. Voss,
Assistant Director, University Computing Services
2711 E. 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47408
phone: 812-855-7676
fax: 812-855-7868
email: bvoss@indiana.edu
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~ucsdcas/iss/
ATTENDING THE JULY MEETING:
Brian D. Voss
(bvoss@indiana.edu)
Sue B. Workman,
Manager, UCS Support Center
(sbworkma@indiana.edu)
Gary R. Alspaugh,
Manager, Department Computing Support
(galspaug@indiana.edu)
Duane J. Schau,
Director of Technology, Political Science Department
(dschau@indiana.edu)
ALSO ON THE PROJECT TEAM (but not attending July meeting):
Mark Lynch
(lynch@indiana.edu)
Diane Jung-Gribble
(jung@indiana.edu)
BRIEF PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Indiana University has long recognized that the advent of distributed computing would lead to the need for distributed support. Although centralized information technology services have continued to exist and grow, the vast majority of the growth in IT has occured on the desktop and within departmental computing environments. From beginnings in the late 80’s when distributed support was first seeded by the central computing organization (CCO) within departments, UCS has been evolving the distributed support environment to it’s current state as one of thepremier examples of how to avoid the crisis in support of information technology. In 1993, the Leveraged Support Model was born out of a need to better define roles and responsibilities of the constituent parties — the CCO, local support providers in departments, and the end users themselves.
For a complete look at the IU environment, please view the Infrastructure Support Services web page at http://www.indiana.edu/~ucsdcas/iss/.
Indiana University is very interested in participating in this initiative as a way to both share our successes and to learn from others about how they have addressed the challenge of information technology support. While we feel we have one of the premier computing support structures in higher education, there remain areas of concern and we would hope to benefit from working with other institutions who may have addressed and resolved thesechallenges.
Some specific areas/issues we would like to focus on:
Educating faculty — faculty are one of the most challengingconstituent groups when it comes to imparting basic (or more advanced) computing skills.
Increasing use of online electronic knowledge bases by the use ofeasy-to-use web-based help applications.
Developing consortiums of knowledge base maintenance amoung higher education institutions.
These are the main issues, but there are many others related to Local Support Provider coordination and communication, end-user skill development and ways to leverage many sources of education, and Central Computing Organization staff retention in a competitive support-provider market.