Service Desk as a Single Point of Contact for MUNI Users

In the article devoted to Incident Management (The Service and the Incident), we described the process of solving an incident, while in the first part, we were dealing with its detection. Users can do this by themselves, but they need to know where to report (their) problems with services. For those purposes, there is the IT Service Desk, which we discuss in this article.

23 Apr 2021 Tomáš Bejček Article

Last year, we had over 70 user services (CFS – customer-facing service) defined at ICS. If each service owner had to communicate and address all requests from users of his/her service within their work agenda, they would probably not do anything else. Due to this, we have the Service Desk at MUNI, which represents a bridge between users using IT services, their owners, and technically oriented teams.

„Service Desk: single point of contact (SPOC) between the company and its customers, employees, and business partners. The Service Desk (SD) allows users to communicate with the organization's IT departments easily.“

IT Service Desk at MUNI

The beginning of the MU IT Service Desk arises from the call center service, which has been operating for many years, and now it is provided by SD. Through gradual development, we have moved from the mere receipt and transmission of the request to the position of Helpdesk. At this point, we were able to solve the first incidents and provide essential support to users. Today, we are the IT Service Desk, and we receive and deal with incidents, service requests, and requests for information. We are the ticket owner (service or incident) until it is successfully resolved. We provide assistance and support to services.

We deal with and take care of:

Receipt of user requests in the form of a telephone call: +420 549 49 7777 (IT service desk) or +420 549 49 1111 (CallCentrum), ticket (it@muni.cz), and online chat (it.muni.cz)
Monitoring and managing requests, incidents, problems, accesses, events and communicating their status to users.
Solving IT problems of all departments in the organization
Active monitoring of services using the Icinga surveillance tool
Ownership of the ticket (request or incident) until successfully resolved
Administration of the University Computer Centre
The positive experience of our users in solving their requests and building trust in the provider of IT services at MUNI

„We help not only users of provided IT services but also their owners. We are their partners in providing quality and available IT services and building a positive perception from users.“

We communicate with MUNI users and cooperate with other IT centers of the university both in passing requests (tickets) to appropriate teams (also CITs) and acting as an escalation point for requests from CITs and their users. At the same time, we are able to offer support to users for services provided by ICS outside the university.

Sources of Information for SD Regarding MUNI IT Services

IT MUNI (it.muni.cz)

As RT data proves, we often draw on publicly available information on IT MUNI. In case of recurring questions, we suggest changes to the presentation of the information on the website itself. These are usually incorporated after consultation with the service owner. This improves the presentation level of IT MUNI and also reduces the burden of repetitive queries on both the SD and the service owner.

Unified operational documentation and MUNI IT Services space

In 2020, the project that included the migration of all service documentation to one place (Confluence) begun. It should bring transparency of information for the IT community, streamline updating information, and facilitate the management of IT services. As part of the project, the Unified Operating Documentation support service and the MUNI IT Services space were created, where the DITS and former KB services are already migrated. This makes updating the necessarily agreed escalations, instructions, and other collaborations faster and more pleasant.

Surveillance center (service monitoring)

The surveillance center is undergoing a fundamental change both in technology (transition from Nagios to Icinga2 and the new tool Uptime) and in the concept of viewing services. The target state is to have all existing and new services viewed in Icinga; the probes then divided according to:

priorities - when the components of one service and thus the service itself can be in multiple priorities according to the impact of component failure on the operation of the service
services
technical layers of the service in connection with, e.g., service <application <server/database <network

The Uptime tool helps us monitor the availability of individual websites of the services provided.

Service Desk Key Performance Indicators

The main Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the Service Desk are:

First-call resolution rate (FCR) - Percentage of tickets resolved by the first response. FCR shows the effectiveness of the Service Desk. Increasing FCR helps improve end-user productivity.
Price per contact - The total cost of operating the Service Desk concerning the number of calls and tickets made during a specific period. The value measures the productivity of the Service Desk.
Ticket volume - Tracking the volume of tickets provides an overview of peak hours and can indicate staff requirements and planning.
Recurring incidents - Similarities in frequent occurring incidents monitor the mean time to detection (MTTD) and the mean time to resolution (MTTR). The declining trend for these metrics indicates how effective is the support service in learning from past events.
Requests and incidents trend - Tracking development data concerning the number of tickets for a specific area over a period of time may determine the need for further automation to prevent or resolve the issue.
Unsolved tickets (backlog) - Tracking backlog requests and improving efficiency helps avoid high support time and administrative costs for running a company.

Planning (Jira IT Service Management and Others...)

Streamlining the above Service Desk activities, KPI reporting and subsequent innovations will be possible after the deployment and integration of Atlassian tools - Jira IT Service Management (ticketing system meeting ITIL standards), Confluence (documentation platform), Insight (configuration database), and Opsgenie (automated alerts for failure) and the Icinga2 surveillance tool:

Incident recovery automation
Incident escalation automation using rule-based procedures; it is possible by identifying the key characteristics of the reported incidents and directing them to the relevant support teams.
Automated e-mails and request status updates
Comprehensive monitoring of requests and reporting on them using various views and dashboards
Configurable ticket categories
Scripted answers
Service Level Agreement (SLA) Monitoring
Self-service customer portal with the integrated knowledge base

Some of the activities listed above are already fully running. We will complete the migration of Confluence to the cloud in the coming days. At the same time, we are working intensively on the structure of the CMDB and the definition of its configuration items, on the design of a self-service portal for entering requests and incidents by the user himself. Last but not least, we are also working on the concept of the Surveillance Center using the Icinga2 and Uptime tools.

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