SAIT Polytechnic Consolidates Help Desk Management
SAIT Polytechnic in Alberta, Canada has
switched to a unified help desk application for its academic and administrative
departments to improve technical support across the campus.
Previously, the college used separate help desk applications to support its
academic and administrative departments, making it difficult to track tickets or
collaborate on common issues. The information systems team also had to manually
import customer and asset data into its old help desk system, and it would take
weeks to add new students to the system.
In an effort to improve its workflow, the team decided to consolidate and
automate its help desk systems by implementing FrontRange's HEAT
Service Management solution across different teams and service desks. With
HEAT, all service requests are channeled through HEAT. Faculty, staff and
students can manage their own tickets through browser-based Web forms, and the
information services team can more easily track tickets. According to
FrontRange, "since upgrading to HEAT, SAIT has been able to support twice as
many service request tickets."
SAIT's Microsoft Active Directory system is integrated with HEAT, "which
allows updates and changes to customer information to follow the existing
business-rule system," according to FrontRange.
In addition to HEAT Service Management, SAIT has also implemented HEAT's
Self-Service and Survey modules. The Self-Service module is intended to help
improve service desk efficiency and reduce service desk workloads, while the
Survey module solicits user feedback to help the information systems team
improve performance.
In the future, SAIT hopes to further improve its process and automation by
implementing product enhancements developed by other groups. "If another group
has developed an enhancement, we can take their configurations and implement it
ourselves," said Scott Taylor, manager of Technical Services at SAIT
Polytechnic, in a prepared statement.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].