As of July 2024, both the new IT Services Help Desk and ServiceNow web portal are now available to students, faculty and staff for simplified assistance from the IT Department.
Located on the second floor of the Love Library, the ITS Help desk is a merger of the Library Computing Hub, IT User Services and the Faculty Instructional Technology Center. This allows for a single point of contact for many technology-related questions such as SDSUid, Duo, Canvas and SDSU email.
“One of the things that we look for is how many different places do people go to get help and where is the source of truth,” Kirk Campbell, Interim Senior Associate Vice President and Deputy Chief Information Officer, said. “Is it in the colleges? Is it in the library for students? Is it in other IT areas across campus? So one of the things that we wanted to do was really create a central, not only physical location but just kind of a repository of knowledge.”
This change is meant to allow for a more streamlined source of information and assistance for faculty, staff and students. Instead of needing to find or remember different phone numbers or office locations, they only need one: (619) 594-HELP. Assistance is also expected to be quicker with technicians all working at one help desk.
Those who can’t go in person also have online options with the Information Technology (IT) website, phone or Zoom. Their current hours for virtual help are 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 10 p.m. Sundays.
“The goal with this would be, it should not matter where you are in the world or what campus you’re on, you should be able to get service and help from our IT services help desk,” Campbell said.
Technicians working at the ITS Help Desk also have benefited from the changes according to Aurora Velasco, IT Services and Service Management Director, due to the number of staff members.
“I was told anecdotally, one of the staff members that used to work the Library Computing Hub said a year ago today there was a line out the door of students needing to reset their passwords but now with this merger, there’s more technicians on-site to be able to provide that support,” Velasco said. “Sure, it was busy, I’m not going to lie, but there wasn’t a horde of students in the line out the door. They were getting their needs met in a much quicker way.”
The Help Desk had a soft launch beginning in July 2024 to prepare and work out the technical bugs before the Fall semester. This also allowed them the opportunity to train both new and old technicians.
“We were trying to just do everything possible to fix it before Fall and I think the team did a really good job with that,” Velasco said. “The system looks different in that month. Even down to the aesthetic choices and making buttons bigger. It was a huge improvement already I think from July to August.”
The new ServiceNow web portal is intended to be the main source to send requests for all IT-related issues and it allows users to submit IT Support requests and search their “self-help knowledge base.”
“We moved toward this model because we heard from our students, faculty and staff that they needed a streamlined process for getting IT support and doing so would improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of IT service and support,” Campbell said.
Students, faculty and staff can use this web portal to submit support tickets if they are having trouble with setting up their Canvas course, need to reset their SDSU password or have any other online issues. Users can do this without being signed into their SDSU account, allowing them to retrieve their account if needed.
“Being logged in automatically ties in a user’s name, SDSU ID, it’s easy for us to see who it is and follow up,” Velasco said. “But we also offer a guest ticket option because there’s going to be a student out there or staff or faculty that forgot their SDSU ID password. So we don’t want them to feel stuck in getting support.”
Submitting a ticket – something students couldn’t do in the past – requires the user to write a short description of their problem then when completed the form is automatically routed to somebody who can help based on the keywords used. If for some reason it ends up in the wrong location, technicians can reassign it to the proper one.
When the ticket has landed in the right location, the user will receive an email and they can see their results there or via ServiceNow. Responding to the email will also turn it into a comment on the ticket so the user doesn’t need to return to the web portal.
“The tickets are nice too because it’s a way we can track data,” Velasco said. “We can see what are the most common issues coming in. I can tell you right now, I know SDSU ID is the No. 1 thing that we get here at the help desk for support. No. 1 by far and away. Nothing else even comes close.”
Once the ticket is resolved, a survey is sent to the user where they can provide feedback that can be used to improve the system.
ServiceNow web page also has an AI “virtual agent” bot where users can ask for help at any time of the day, whether technicians are available or not. It can answer questions by providing a generated answer or displaying articles related to the entered prompt.
“We learned from a survey of folks in higher education that about 70% of students would rather find the self-help resource before calling tech support, and if that’s the case, I don’t think our previous desks … really had a lot of self-help resources,” Velasco said. “And so we tried to have a bunch of articles on there for common issues like how do I reset my password? I got a new phone, how do I activate Duo now?”
In the future, Velasco and Campbell want to incorporate other departments and services into ServiceNow including financial aid, the registrar’s office, housing and more. They would also like to see more staff and more student employees involved so they can offer quick assistance for users.
“So we have some plans for next year as we do the beginning of the semester to try to have a more presence in helping our students, whether it’s here in the library or different on campus,” Campbell said. “So we have lots of ideas that we’ve kind of generated and we’ll implement them as we have resources to do so.”
