User Support Issues
The University community, as a whole, is composed of a large
number of faculty, staff, and students.
Although the majority of this community is located on
and/or around the Gainesville campus, both the Institute of
Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) and the University
Health Science Center (HSC) support a large contingent of
personnel that are permanently stationed at various locations
throughout the state.
Irrespective of their assigned location in the state, the
faculty, staff, and students require equal access to the wide
variety of computing resources and information available on
campus and throughout the Internet.
With respect to this diverse user community, five support
areas need to be addressed: Departmental Level Support, Single
Point of Contact, Training, Access, and Communication with
Users.
Departmental
Level Support
The
primary support for network usage needs to reside at the local
(departmental or college) level.
Because of the unique nature of most local area
networks and their interface to larger networks, it makes the
most sense for each department to have a designated network
support person who is familiar with the computing environment
in that department and with the applications being used.
Where smaller departments are unable to justify this
level of staffing, several departments should be encouraged to
share a line item for a computer support person or perhaps
consolidated support could be provided at the college level.
It is important that these local personnel be able to
assist with installation, basic training, troubleshooting, and
problem determination.
Single
Point of Contact
Along
with the departmental and college-level support there needs to
be a campus-wide single point of contact.
This would be one phone number that any computer user
can call for initial problem discussions or questions.
Most likely, this should continue to be the UF
Computing Help Desk. In
many instances, calls to this number might result in referral
to the appropriate departmental or college resource person. Department and college-level consultants should make sure
that personnel at this central site are apprised of the
computing environment in their college and of any problems
which might affect end users.
This phone number should be answered 24 hours a day, 7
days a week (24/7). In-person
problem resolution, referral, and follow-up would be provided
during prime and second shift hours with more limited
emergency response available during third shift. Third-shift
coverage could perhaps be provided by current 24/7 operations
personnel. Follow-ups
should be conducted by the central site when referrals have
been made to make sure that problem resolution was successful.
Access
Every
university office and residence hall should have 24/7 access
TO the central campus network, administrative applications
where appropriate, the campus CWIS, and out to the Internet
(except during scheduled or emergency maintenance).
The university also needs to ensure that there are
sufficient resources to provide remote access to central sites
FROM off-campus locations (student, staff, and faculty homes,
and off-campus offices) and from distant locations when
required by faculty and staff away on University business.
Training
Network Services needs to coordinate ongoing training both for
the end users of network services and for the technical
personnel who provide and manage those services.
End users need regular training in the use of network services
and in ways to access those services.
In most cases, the training on access and on the use of
departmental network services needs to be done on an
individual or departmental basis by departmental network
managers because of the unique nature of most departmental
environments. Campus-wide training in the use of campus-wide
network services (such as the campus CWIS, the UF Menu System,
etc.) and beyond (such as World-Wide Web home pages, etc.) can
best be handled through ongoing training programs such as
those currently provided by the Library, the Faculty Support
Center for Computing (FSC), the Personnel Division, and the
DAta Network Computer Education (DANCE) program.
Service providers need to make consistent use of these
ongoing programs to provide updated training to staff
campus-wide.
Technical personnel also need training to help them keep up
with the legal and technical changes inherent in managing a
constantly changing computing environment.
This training needs to be provided university-wide,
including personnel from the Education and General (E&G)
budget, IFAS, the Health Center, and Shands.
This will require the use of several levels of
training: peer-to-peer, cross training, resource sharing, and
professional-level vendor training. Efficiencies can be
realized by pooling resources to bring vendor classes to
campus for commonly sought topics in order to save money
normally spent on travelling to remote sites.
Technical personnel also need to be provided with
training in the areas of network management, project
management, communication skills, and the other affective
components of their job duties.
The technical training needs of the campus are
currently being studied by a workgroup of the Council on
Information Technologies and Services Standing Committee on
Administrative Computing (CITSADMN). It is recommended that attention be paid to the specific
needs of campus network managers in this study.
The coordination of these training efforts needs to be
addressed centrally.
Communication
with Users
With
growing dependence on network services, it is imperative that
we formalize the means for communicating with end users about
the status of the network.
While it is realized that one cannot anticipate
emergency problems, it is important that we communicate
changes and planned maintenance outages in advance whenever
possible so that users are not unnecessarily confused or
frustrated when trying to accomplish their work through the
networks. It
should be the responsibility of the departmental network
managers to communicate with their users in advance of any
known network problems, changes, or outages.
Centrally, departmental coordinators need to keep personnel at
the single point of contact informed of any planned changes so
that explanations can be provided to end users when the
departmental resource person is not available.
It is recommended that a listserv or web site be
established so that communication can be kept current among
network personnel and so that there can be an accessible
location for network information. This would enable
departmental personnel to keep information about their own
systems updated and permit the information to be available
campus-wide.
Recommendation US1: Every
department should designate a network support person who will
provide basic training, troubleshooting, problem determination
and resolution for the users of that unit.
The designee's job description should reflect these
responsibilities.
Recommendation US2: The
UF Computing Help Desk should be given the resources and
responsibility to be the single point of contact for all
users, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The Help Desk should also be responsible for maintaining a
list of departmental user support personnel and should have
access to network personnel who can provide 24/7 problem
resolution.
Recommendation US3: Network
Services should be given the resources and responsibility to
establish an 800-number modem pool to provide access to
faculty, staff and students from off-campus locations, both
local and statewide, including remote IFAS and Health Center
locations.
Recommendation US4: Network
Services should be given the resources and responsibility to
serve as the campus-wide coordinator of training for technical
and department network support personnel.
Resources should also be made available to those units
that provide the training.
Recommendation US5: The
UF Computing Help Desk should establish a web site or listserv
for network personnel and end users{ in order to communicate
about the status of our networks.
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