The University Support Center Dashboard

This is the continuation of a transcript of a presentation by Stu Worman from Indiana University at an IT conference for unversity IT professionals.

This is the chart that shows top 5 downloads. We have IU Ware system that distributes software online, and this tells me for the last 30 days what are people downloading. Sometimes you need to know what are people downloading. For the last 30 days, Microsoft Office Professional has been downloaded 10,000 times. Why is that?

We just started school. We have 8 to 10,000 new people in there. And they got access to a really valuable, free program to them. We know the antivirus software downloads. These are exactly the kinds of things that we would expect to see at this point.

But if I saw something pop up here that I wasn’t expecting, then you have to take action on it. Maybe somebody broke into our systems. Maybe somebody is selling this software. Somebody is doing something they shouldn’t be doing, or that there is another problem.

Let’s take a look at the university support center dashboard. These are our contacts to our help desk, our support center. What we can start to know is how do these things change, how do they relate to each other? One thing that I have learned over time is that when you see an increase in calls to our support center, as a user support director, it means something to me. It means some thing has changed.

What has changed in the environment? Is it because there are outages? Is it because there are things going on that we need to fix? Did we change something where we didn’t prepare properly?

What I have learned from this is that a change doesn’t just affect our support group. It affects our call center operators, the people who answer the phones. Because if people can’t get through to the support center, they will start calling any number they can get an answer to. And I didn’t know that before. I didn’t know that it really affected other organizations and how they have to respond to an event. So we started training them. We start giving them information, start giving them tools so they can help with those kind of events.