same campus, different worlds
Like many colleges and universities, North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC has traditionally separated computing resources for administrative and academic users. This allows different groups to focus on different aspects of IT - students don't use PeopleSoft much, and payroll officers don't much care about Blackboard, and their support organizations trend the same way. But, from a management and financial point of view, duplicating services is costly, and most universities and colleges have at least looked at the feasibility of merging these two service units together. In 2007, NC State went beyond feasibility studies, and merged the two former units into the Office of Information Technology - combining everything from infrastructure to business services to the Help Desks. This paper and presentation will track the formation of the NC State Help Desk and what that involved, from the standpoint of the employees, the management, the customers, the technology, the processes, and even the dress code. Merging looks easy on paper, but there are a lot of organizational, procedural, and emotional considerations to take into account before putting two different cultures into a brave new world. The content should be of interest to people undergoing or planning to undergo a similar change, or people interested in seeing how an enterprise-level Help Desk is thought out and constructed.
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