Today ITS announced their Tiered Support Model (this link is on the state intranet). What they've developed is a localized implementation of the tiered support model described in this paper.
The primary goals of ITS, in altering its organizational structure and processes, are:
- putting into practice a consistent, customer-focused process for assisting customers;
- tracking every issue and request--and performing trends--in order to improve the quality of our products, services and processes;
- eliminating reoccurring issues by identifying and resolving the "root cause" of each issue;
- improving response and resolution times; and,
- developing a knowledge base as a resource in providing prompt, accurate problem resolution.
They've been working on this for some time and its been in pilot for a few months. They report that during the pilot period:
- There has been a significant increase in documented issues and requests, due to customers submitting all issues and requests to Customer Support.
- There has been a small, measurable decrease in average time to problem resolution.
- There has been a lower percentage of reoccurring issues.
- There has been a greater number of issues being resolved at first contact with Customer Support.
Along with these positive results, the TSM should also, in time, result in clarity of roles for engineering and operations groups throughout the state. In addition, the TSM establishes a set of metrics for operations and customer support that can be tracked over time and used to drive improvement.
This has been a large undertaking for all involved and a significant change (which is always difficult). If ITS is to be the vendor of choice for delivering basic IT services to agencies, this is the kind of change that must be made. I take my hat off to ITS and congratulate them on the launch.
