The Carleton and St. Olaf IT departments both use a product called Web Helpdesk as our ticket tracking databases. We recently started a project to combine our separate instances of the product into one shared instance; as both the number of shared services and the number of faculty, staff, and students who spend time at both institutions increase, we need a more seamless and streamlined method of providing support. A shared ticketing system will allow us to take advantage of the deep reserves of knowledge both IT groups possess; provide better support for staff, faculty, and students, regardless of which institution they are at; and simplify getting support for services provided by one institution for use by both.
Over the past several months, a group made up of IT staff from both institutions has been examining how the two campuses currently use Web Helpdesk, as well as ways that our processes and workflows align and are different. Our goals are to align our processes where possible, providing more expertise and a shared understanding of how events should flow, and to take advantage of the unique ways each school has been using the software. Once we have a clear picture of how we want our business processes to work, we’ll design a structure in Web Helpdesk to support it, providing clear and easy routing of issues to the appropriate people to resolve them.
Our next step is to create a shared test instance of Web Helpdesk, allowing us to explore the logistics of sharing the system. Once we’re comfortable with how sharing will work, we’ll create a prototype of the new ticket workflow in the test environment and make sure that our ideas will work in practice. Finally, we’ll migrate both campuses’ open tickets and hardware data into the new environment and stop using our separate local copies. Our goal is to be on a single system by the start of Fall Term 2017.