People at the University of Iowa count on stellar customer support and strong underlying infrastructure to meet their IT needs. OneIT made strides in both areas in 2021. Here are a few highlights and metrics. 

Catering to customers 

Higher service ratings: Customers of the Information Technology Services (ITS) Help Desk reported increased satisfaction during the pandemic, survey results showed. The Help Desk asks customers to rate their experience from “totally satisfied” (5) to “totally dissatisfied” (1). ITS examined whether there were changes in customer satisfaction as many IT professionals transitioned to fully or partly remote work arrangements during the pandemic. Using 2019 as a baseline year and comparing it to July 2020 to September 2021, the analysis found: 

  • The percent of customers giving the highest rating, totally satisfied, increased from 82.7% to 87.7%, a 5% increase. 
  • The percent reporting they were satisfied or totally satisfied increased from 92.6% to 96%, a 3.4% increase.  
  • The percent of customers reporting they were dissatisfied went down by almost half, from 4.2% to 2.2%.  
  • The average rating score increased from 4.69 to 4.80.   

Getting questions to the right place:  In February, OneIT introduced a new IT service management platform called Cherwell. The system is used to track and assign customer requests—which is critical, considering that nearly 70,000 tickets were filed throughout the year. There are 145 OneIT support groups using Cherwell and OneIT is now on the same system as Health Care Information Systems (HCIS), making it easy to direct customer requests to the right place for help. Coming soon is a new self-service portal that will allow students, faculty, and staff to directly submit requests any time day or night, and then track the status as their request is worked on. Cherwell may also be used to track IT equipment. 

A popular hub for IT info: The ITS website, packed with information about IT services and how-to content, is one of the most heavily used websites on campus. It garnered nearly 3.9 million pageviews in 2021—a 15% increase in traffic over the previous year. The IT service alerts page saw a dramatic 800% spike in traffic as increased promotion of the resource drove more individuals to visit the site to check on the status of key services.

Strong support from students: OneIT and its customers rely on the skills and talents of student employees for a host of tasks—taking calls at the Help Desk, working on websites, maintaining and installing equipment, performing administrative tasks, and much more. Many of these students use their IT work experience to land great jobs after graduation, including some who find positions within the UI. ITS alone employs 66 students, who logged more than 20,000 hours of service in the past year.  

Enhancing tools and foundations 

Modern phone and email systems: In recent years, OneIT and HCIS have partnered to convert traditional phone lines to Skype for Business, which uses the internet to make calls and offers users a host of improved features such as instant messaging, video conferencing, and integrations with other Microsoft tools. They recently reached a milestone in completing that conversion, which involved 10,300 Skype for Business users. They were also able to retire more than 4,000 lines that were no longer needed. HCIS will manage the service, as part of ongoing increased collaboration across the UI’s IT organizations. The change also saves money, eliminating the need to maintain infrastructure for traditional phones. IT professionals are also nearing the end of a major project to migrate thousands of health care email accounts to Office 365, a service managed by OneIT. Having all email accounts on the same platform makes it easier for people to collaborate across health care and other university units.  

Better network connections: A reliable internet connection is essential, and a recently completed project replaced the technology behind every wired ethernet port on campus—that’s 73,652 total ports in over 90 different buildings. The completion of this project improves the reliability of computers connecting to wired network ports and boosts the performance of campus wireless services. It also significantly decreases the risk of a cybersecurity incident and paves the way for future enhancements. 

Securing devices: The UI manages thousands of computers and other devices, ensuring that systems and software are up to date and monitored for security issues. OneIT migrated more than 16,000 Windows devices to a centralized group in its device-management system, enabling IT professionals to simplify and speed up patching for security vulnerabilities and improve response times to evolving threats.