Specifications include, but are not limited to: The University of Arkansas’s department of Information Technology Services currently manages 2 separate Help Desk teams (general purpose and Blackboard Learn) providing support services to campus in 3 physical locations. Users and staff communicate with these Help Desks via phone calls, emails, online support tickets, remote logins, and walk-ins. Both teams use our homegrown PHP-based ticketing system, Bomgar for remote login, as well as web-based knowledge base articles to assist with solutions. The Help Desks close for University observed holidays and University closings for inclement weather conditions, as well as after their defined hours of operation. Note: our data center is staffed 24/7/365 for system monitoring and outage reporting/ staff paging. The general purpose Help Desk operates Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. In addition to the Help Desk role, this group is used as the department’s phone operator. Currently this team supports faculty, staff, students, emeritus faculty, retired staff, applicants, parents, and vendors. Approximately 50,000 general purpose support instances were logged in 2014, including 26,775 (53.5%) phone calls, 12,407 (24.8% ) tickets initiated, 9,293 (18.6%) email messages, and 1,525 (3.1%) remote login or walk-in support instances. Approximately 12.6% of the phone calls came in after regular hours of operation. The smallest call percentage received was for general IT questions or incident reporting, whereas over 55% were account/access related (usually password problems) and slightly under 40% were from vendors or requests to speak to a specific staff person. The Blackboard Learn Help Desk operates Monday through Thursday, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday, 6 to 11 p.m. This team primarily supports faculty and students, but also supports staff as well. The Blackboard Help Desk supports general IT needs as well as a specialized tool set including Blackboard Learn, our campus’s LMS (Learning Management System), and its associated plug-ins and programs. This includes but is not limited to: web conferencing, video and lecture capture, test taking and creation tools, and plagiarism detection software. Specifically, the applications used at the University for these associated programs and plug-ins are Blackboard Collaborate, Lifesize, Clearsea, Kaltura, Echo360, SafeAssign, and Respondus. In 2014, the Blackboard Help Desk had 7,370 instances and was able to resolve 87.5% upon initial contact. The majority of the contacts came through the Blackboard Help Desk phone number 3,181 (43%), email 1,820 (25%), and Blackboard Help Desk Extended Hours phone line 1,053 (14%). Additionally, in Oct 2014, we implemented a VoIP solution (Ooma) for the Blackboard Help Desk line that enabled us to better track and to manage simultaneous calls. From that time, we averaged 40 calls per month after the Help Desk closed, providing an estimated additional 480 calls for the year. Therefore, approximately, 7,800 calls/contacts are estimated for 2014. In summary: Help Desk support operates 80 hours per week, leaving 88 hours a week needed for “after hours” support, not including the additional hours needed to cover University closings such as holidays and inclement weather, when we will require our “after hours” vendor to provide coverage to ensure 24/7/365. This would include complete coverage from Christmas Eve through New Year’s day. Help Desk support total instances 57,370: calls 31,117, tickets 12,407, email 11,113, remote log-in or walk-in 1,641. The University of Arkansas currently utilizes an analog phone system provisioned by AT&T. A successful and necessary migration to a campus-wide VoIP system first requires upgrades to the network electronics and cabling infrastructure. The general Help Desk’s main line is able to roll to 6 other lines. We are also looking for a temporary VoIP solution that would enable better service and tracking for the Help Desks, as a campus-wide VoIP phone systems is several years out. At this time passwords cannot be reset over the phone. We do have a web-based password reset site that users are directed to in order to reset expired passwords. This system requires that users remember their old password or be able to answer the user defined security question to create a new password.
