After a massive internal review, the University of Dundee has signed a 120,000, five-year business services deal with Touchpaper.
A 2002 IT services review prompted the university to replace its previous help desk system with a more robust alternative.
"We went through a review a few years back about out network and infrastructure as well as our support and services for people who use IT," said Tom Mortimer, director of computing services at the university.
The school had been using a Helpline product for over eight years, Mortimer said. "I'm not even sure it's a supported product anymore," he said.
Rather than a basic helpdesk system, the school decided it needed a broader service management tool. "We wanted to move from a technological to customer service - to do this is quite a significant change," Mortimer said. "We needed something to act as glue to pull all that together."
Dundee chose Touchpaper because offered a web-based system which would integrate with the school's Novell platform and be capable of supporting an organisation of their size.
The school's IT system has 23,000 users - 3,500 of which are distance learners - and takes over 20,000 help desk calls annually.
Using the previous solution, 48 per cent of recorded help requests were dealt with by first-line staff. Under the Touchpaper system, Mortimer hopes that will improve to 65 per cent. "We currently have 12 different routes to contact the helpdesk, we want that down to three - one email, one phone and the web," he said.
As well, after considering the results of the review, the school wanted a system which was compatible with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practice framework, which they hope will help reduce problems related to IT services changes.
Over 60 per cent of problems reported to the IT department were based on change management processes, said Mortimer. "We're shooting ourselves in the foot," he said. Using the ITIL best practices with the new IT system should improve that to just ten per cent, he said.
The first phase of the Touchpaper rollout should be finished at the end of May, with the entire implementation done by the end of this year, Mortimer said.
