In order to better assist members of the community, Choate’s Information Technology Services Department (ITS) has reformed its help desk. The main goals of these changes are to decrease waiting time for students and faculty and provide more effective services.
The first significant change is that six department members, including Director of the ITS Department Mr. Andrew Speyer, will take shifts answering calls. This change hopes to address a previous issue where there would be times at which there was limited coverage on the phone lines. For smaller problems that can be solved within five to ten minutes, there will be immediate guidance and advice given over the phone. This means problems that can be resolved relatively quickly will no longer have to be solved after waiting for appointments and overcoming limited scheduling.
If a problem will take more than ten minutes, the help desk will open, ticket, record aspects of the issue, and take the damaged technology, typically an iPad or a laptop, to be looked at more closely. Within 24 hours, a staff member will contact students or faculty with the status of their problem.
The help desk will also implement FreshService, a method of describing technical issues more easily and facilitating the help process. FreshService itself produces a service desk software that focuses on providing a simple, easy-to-use interface for its customers. Choate has now created a support website with FreshService, where students can log in with their Choate network account and password to log a ticket, and track the progress of their reported issues. Of these new changes, Charlie Dillon ’21 said, “I really appreciate being able to track what issues I have logged and what progress is being made, a technological issue can be really stressful, especially if it is affecting your academic performance here.”
Members of ITS have also developed a more proactive initiative for solving technological issues. Instead of waiting for the problems to come to them, they will, as Mr. Speyer said, “get out more and see you in your classroom, office, or area.” ITS is changing its office hours, under the newest changes the hours last from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every weekday except Wednesday, where the office runs from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m where the office closes for professional development and classroom visits. ITS hopes the longer hours will accommodate students and faculty who need assistance later during the day.
Zaid Ball ’20, a four year senior and prefect in Logan Munroe, said, “This is a pretty welcome change for the ITS help desk, ever since the ITS help desk moved from their location from under the dining hall to Brownell, it’s availability has been severely limited due to the simple fact that students are so busy that is hard to find time in the day to walk to Brownell.”
