New service desk for merged university

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Following the merger of the University of Paisley and Bell College, the newly-created University of West Scotland has upgraded its service desk system to create unified support for the 20,000 students and staff across four campuses.

The merger caused a 30 per cent increase in support requests for the new school, putting strain on the merged IT department. Some 1,500 requests come in monthly, for anything from password resets to downed networks.

Before the merger, Bell College had their own in-house system, while Paisley was using RMS - the latter of which caused some trouble between front and second line IT support staff at the new school.

While front line staff were happy with the RMS service desk system, second line support - the technicians and back-end employees - were not. "But the second line support... didn't like it, so it was used inefficiently, or not at all," said Brian Mullins, the university's ICT services director.

So when the five year licence came up, the university started a lengthy tender process - only to narrow its choices down to Touchpaper and again RMS. The former won out for a few reasons, Mullins said, despite RMS being cheaper - although the Touchpaper IT Business Management system still came in under £100,000. The more modern technology, such as being web-based and offering a graphical user intergace (GUI) for process design, convinced the second line support team. As well, the university hopes to move to IT Infrastructure Library best practices by the next academic year, which is supported by the Touchpaper system.

Lastly, the service offered by Touchpaper was stronger: "The response from Touchpaper as a company was streets ahead of RMS," Mullins said.

But indecision between the two products caused a lengthy tender process - meaning the rollout started late. "Higher education staff tend to be very poor at making decisions," remarked Mullins. Because of the delays, the system was implemented in a short, quick way. The RMS license ran out on 1 August, and the new system was up and running in three days - though Mullins' IT staff have spent the past few months unpicking the settings and configurations they "slammed" in at the time. "We survived - the simple goal was to replace RMS by the first of August, and we missed it by three days," he said.

Reconfiguring the system has been far easier to do with the Touchpaper system, Mullins said, because of the GUI interface. As well, the web-based front end means the system can add users when needed.

Despite the new technology, the system still faces an uphill battle overcoming staff who don't like the higher-level of management the Touchpaper system offers, Mullins said. "We haven't solved some cultural issues with staff - they don't like the Big Brother aspect of it. But that's purely internal culture," Mullins said.

Indeed, the next big project, alongside the ITIL rollout, will be looking at problem and change management, Mullins said.

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