Taking advantage of this “quieter” summer time, we have upgraded our Service Desk to a system which adopts the ITIL framework of best practices in the IT service industry. In short, this framework aims at delivering high quality IT services to end users as well as contributing higher business value to the organization.

How does this affect you as our user?

• When you seek assistance from ITSC Service Desk (by personal visit, email or phone call), you will receive an auto email acknowledgment which contains an incident number that is assigned to your case. By stating this incident number, you can check with us on the status of your case at any time.
   
• Service Level Management (SLM) has been introduced to measure our response and resolution time. Reminders and escalations are built in the system to remind our colleagues when your case has been outstanding for a while. This helps our colleagues prioritize cases on hand and avoid cases dropping into "black holes". 
   
• Your submitted case is now assigned to a supporting group instead of an individual support colleague. This will ensure your case is in good hands and other colleagues can follow up on your case when individual colleagues are on leave or got held up by unexpected situations.

What else have we done to strengthen our support on teaching needs?

A team of student helpers have been trained to perform morning and evening preventive checks on the computing and audiovisual equipment in the teaching venues on a daily basis. When they have identified a problem, spare equipment (namely, PC, keyboard and mouse) are made available for them to replace and fix the problem on the spot. For those problems that are out of their hands, they will immediately report the problem to our supporting colleagues by SMS such that responsible colleagues can respond timely to the problem.

When the computer fails to operate during a teaching class and the problem is identified to have been caused by hardware issues that will take some time to fix, our colleagues will promptly replace the faulty computer with a spare notebook dedicated to the venue so teaching can be resumed as soon as possible.

What more are we doing?

Moving ahead, we shall, step by step, channel all service requests, enquiries and problems reported to ITSC into the new Service Desk system as the central repository. This will enable us to have a collective view and better understanding of the problems and needs of users. This will ultimately help us improve our services to better serve you!