ITDEVTECH has implemented its solutions in the education sector. Our clients range from Community Colleges to Large Public Sector Universities around the world.
Rhode Island Institute of Design has a centralized help desk that supports five campuses in different cities. Rhode Island Institute of Design has a large end-user population that includes 1,700 employees and 19,000 students from a variety of backgrounds around the world. Rhode Island Institute of Design has a three-tiered incident management team that consists of 17 people categorized into helpdesk first line, second line, and third line. Prior to Tikting, Rhode Island Institute of Design used tools like Request Tracker and CA Unicenter to handle its IT help desk operations. It was a very complex and daunting task to manage the large number of tickets coming in from both the employees as well as students. The help desk technicians were in a constant firefighting mode to handle the large volumes of tickets.
Rhode Island Institute of Design was in need of a help desk tool which supported ITIL processes. At the same time, they were looking for a tool, which had integration with other ITIL processes other than incident management.
Lack of visibility on service requests and inability to create custom reports.
Rhode Island Institute of Design’s end users lacked visibility into the service requests. It was difficult for them to track tickets or identify the technicians who were responsible for the tickets. On the other hand, technicians found it difficult to prioritize the tickets, leading to slower first response and resolution times, which in turn affected the service level agreements.
Managing assets was another important concern at Rhode Island Institute of Design. The university has about 3,500 client computers of which approximately 700 are student lab machines. Rhode Island Institute of Design also runs nearly 300 servers with Linux and Windows operating systems. Approximately 95 percent of those servers are set up to support virtual machines.
In addition, there was no easy way to present help desk information in different types of custom reports. Rhode Island Institute of Design wanted to generate help desk reports, customize them according to their needs, and export them in a variety of formats. This wasn’t possible with the existing system in place.
In addition, there was no easy way to present help desk information in different types of custom reports. Rhode Island Institute of Design wanted to generate help desk reports, customize them according to their needs, and export them in a variety of formats. This wasn’t possible with the existing system in place.
To overcome shortcomings in their current IT help desk applications, Rhode Island Institute of Design evaluated a variety of help desk tools including Tikting.
“Tikting is very easy to install, works out of the box, and is easy to maintain unlike the tools that we used before. Thanks to Tikting’s built-in support for interactions between Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration Management. It is much more process oriented at Rhode Island Institute of Design and much easier to see all changes, associated incidents, and problems aligned together.”
Most of the other tools were very complex to install, lacked guidelines and procedures to setup or maintain, or lacked ITIL capabilities. After a thorough evaluation, Rhode Island Institute of Design’s help desk team chose ITIL-ready Tikting for its ease of use, minimal learning curve, and its integration capabilities. Rhode Island Institute of Design’s help desk team implemented Tikting in 2009. Soon after the implementation, the ticketing mechanism has become more organized and streamlined. Tikting has helped bring order to the help desk. The tickets are now automatically prioritized and routed to the right technicians. The end users and technicians have better visibility of the tickets. The technicians can now collaborate better, and it is easier to track the tickets. The technicians can easily get into conversations with the end users from inside the ticket or get the complete history of a ticket from within a ticket.
With better ticketing workflows, it’s now easier for the technicians to meet the SLAs. Notifications are sent out from the application to Rhode Island Institute of Design’s technicians throughout the ticket lifecycle. The support managers are able to easily create custom reports, export them in various formats and make better decisions based on the reports. “Tikting is very easy to install, works out of the box, and is easy to maintain unlike the tools that we used before. Thanks to Tikting’s built in support for interactions between Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration Management. It is much more process oriented at Rhode Island Institute of Design and much easier to see all changes, associated incidents, and problems aligned together,” says Bernt Granbacke, change manager at Rhode Island Institute of Design.
The well-built request module gives Rhode Island Institute of Design’s technicians the ability to manage all the issues and support requests with ease. Ticket creation and tracking is much more visible with Tikting in place. Tech admins created tasks for tickets; and with the worklog feature, they knew how much time other tech agents worked on tickets, which makes everything trackable and smooth. Not just incident and service request management, things are more integrated in rest of the IT processes at the university. Rhode Island Institute of Design makes extensive use of the Change module in Tikting. Now their change management processes are much more organized and well planned with standardized procedures and workflows in Tikting.
The IT team employ various custom templates for all types of changes and built custom change workflows. Technicians now know what is the status of the change at each stage of the change process. Each stage in the change lifecycle goes through an approval process before processing the change to the next stage. This ensures better control over the changes.
“Tikting with its robust functionality and out of the box ITIL best practices provides us with the power to both satisfy our customers’ needs and to support process management.”
Similarly, other important aspect which is helping Rhode Island Institute of Design a lot is the dashboard which gives an visual overview and a tactical insight of the daily service operation. The dashboards and reporting capabilities of Tikting is helping the management to get a sense of all the help desk operations and how they are faring at the university. Some of them include number of requests which are open, on-hold, and overdue for each tech agent; SLA violated requests or the ones which are approaching SLA etc.
“Bernt Granbacke says, Tikting with its robust functionality and out of the box ITIL best practices provides us with the power to both satisfy our customers’ needs and to support process management.”
