Colleague Connection: A Haven for the IT Perplexed
Meet the Northwestern IT Service Desk, a dedicated team of individuals poised to offer technical guidance for a wide range of IT-related issues, service requests, and inquiries from the IT perplexed. We asked Jonathan Diehl, manager of the IT Service Desk, to share how his team interacts with the University community to provide resolutions for IT-related issues.
What is the role of the IT Service Desk?
The Northwestern IT Service Desk is a unit within Technology Support Services. In most cases, our staff of 19 serves as the first point of interaction with IT for most users through calls to 847-491-4357 (1-HELP), by email to consultant@northwestern.edu, or by a visit to the Technology Support Center on the first floor of the University Library.
The IT Service Desk generally handles a wide range of IT-related incidents, service requests, and user inquiries. This includes troubleshooting technical issues with hardware, software, network connectivity, and other IT services.
We serve as a connection point to other units across campus. We have regular meetings with internal teams within IT, IT stakeholders (Technology Leaders), IT support in schools like Feinberg IT, and other partners outside of IT we may send tickets to, like Student Affairs, the Office of the Registrar, and Human Resources. These meetings help keep our partners in the loop about potential support issues and provide a point of contact in case they have questions. We use dedicated channels for quick routing for some teams where requests are time-sensitive, like the Classroom Support team.
We also work closely with the Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) team, managed by David Gracey, every other week to bring up any issues we notice.
Our partnership meetings become important when we see an issue becoming complex or when a user has been bounced around from group to group within the ticketing system. In those cases, we will try to bring all the important players together and work to resolve the ticket.
What are the functions of the teams at the IT Service Desk?
There are two levels of support agents: Tier One and Tier Two. Tier One reports to Damon Taylor and is the team responsible for taking calls from 1-HELP and making a first pass on ticket resolution. They also provide in-person support at the Technology Support Center in the University Library.
On average, the IT Service Desk receives nearly 400 support requests (phone calls and tickets) each week. Most are readily solved by Tier One. However, if the Tier One agent can’t solve the problem, or there isn’t a clear escalation path, or the issue is related to a particular system, like NUFinancials, CAESAR, or myHR, then Tier Two takes over.
Tier Two reports to me and investigates an issue more deeply. These agents have permission to use more systems and, in some cases, administrative access, which allows them to look at records in those systems, check that the user has the right permissions, or determine if there is another path for the user.
Tier Two’s strong connection to the teams within the systems they support means they have a point of contact for the service to help them troubleshoot when necessary.
How do you handle communication during major incidents or outages?
Sometimes, we notice an issue because of the number of calls we receive and escalate it to the service owner or the Service Operation Center (SOC). However, whenever there is an unexpected service interruption, the most severe incident type is a Priority 1 (P1); we will join the P1 Stakeholder call and immediately put a message on the call tree to acknowledge a service issue. Doing so alerts callers to the problem up front and minimizes the number of calls or tickets we may receive about the issue.
What are the current and upcoming challenges facing the IT Service Desk?
The most prominently reported issues are related to NetID and passwords, which usually can be quickly resolved. However, we do spend a lot of time troubleshooting issues. Understanding what the person is asking and what the problem is isn’t always apparent. For example, someone recently contacted us because they couldn’t log in to Zoom. After investigating, it turned out not to be a Zoom-related issue. Instead, their computer operating system was outdated and no longer compatible with the Zoom service.
Our agents deal with a wide breadth of IT services, and we rely on the accuracy of information within the Internal Knowledge Base (KB). This support resource is meant for our agents or ticketing agents at Northwestern because they need to know more about a service, system, or team. For example, the Quest High-Performance Computing Cluster has an internal KB that tells us who the service owner is, what types of tickets should be escalated, to which internal IT teams they should be sent and any additional considerations. Internal KBs are reviewed annually, but the service owner can update the information anytime (and is encouraged to!).
What emerging technology do you think will have the biggest impact on the IT Service Desk?
The technology most likely to impact the IT Service Desk is artificial intelligence, but more so for its summarizing functionality. A challenge with tickets is looking through all the notes to understand the history—who did what, when, etc. Getting a summary of the actions taken would streamline the time it takes to understand the issue, find a solution, and close the ticket.
Fun Fact: Jonathan is known for spreading cheer by sharing candy sour gummy worms to colleagues in 1800 Sherman when not in the throes of technological support.