Jay Dominick’s Blog

Yes, its been a while since I’ve posted anything to the Blog.  That isn’t because things are slow here, thats for sure.  We’ve been working on getting our Computer Room Move project organized and have also initiated our Novell Migration Projects.  These are in the active planning stages, now.  Both are scheduled to complete this calendar year.

Budget issues continue to be a challenge.  We’ve cut back on travel and purchases and are awaiting further word from the University on what our next steps are. Trying to do this in a thoughtful and consientious manner.

At our last staff meeting we viewed a video about customer service called, “Give Them the Pickle.”  Very interesting and very entertaining.  According to the video, the four components of good customer service are: Continue Reading »

I’m at the Gartner IT Symposium this week.  Information overload, for sure.  I’ll have a full trip report, but thought I would go ahead and share my notes on their Top Ten Trends in IT for 2009: Continue Reading »

Building catalogs of services is all the rage in IT organizations these days.  Best practice methodologies like ITIL consider them to be a fundamental aspect of best practices.  ITS has made several efforts in this area over the past years with little lasting success.  Nonetheless, we will try again.

I’m beginning a two phase approach to try to get it done.  First, we will describe what we think our services are.  A very, very rough list can be found here.  Then we will do focus groups and surveys to find out what our customers think our services are.  We will combine those two pieces of data to produce a customer-oriented service map that helps us align our services according to how our users see them.  We will eventually need the help of the distributed IT staff as we fill out our maps to show linkages to locally delivered services.

When we finally get to a set of well understood services, we will begin measuring our performance in delivering those services and the cost of delivery as well.

The ITS senior leadership team worked to refine the Values Statement based on the comments we got back from the small group work at the staff meeting.  The most current version is on the Wiki.  We will talk more about it at our October Staff Meeting.