Texas-Sized Support

Help Desk Support at Texas A&M University

Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
In the previous slides I've shown you some of the scope. Take a look at this. We've got 256 counties which are supported by six people. There are 12 off campus centers, and not all of those 16 departments have people that they can depend on locally. And then, yesterday, I got a new study in that was released that said that the 6,000 PCs that are reported on there is an underestimate. If we count the notebooks we have somewhere on the order of 8,000 PCs. And, we also have researchers, scientists, administrators, and others who travel worldwide. I've actually connected to people in other portions of the world due to Bomgar™ and A&M has got facilities in Japan and Qatar. And, we are tasked with the job of providing timely support to any of our users at any of these locations when they need it. And, those of you oversees know that scheduling some of those can be very difficult since the time zones can result in us being up at 2:00 am in the morning when it's actually early in the morning for someone else.

Technical hurdles with about 8,000 PCs, many department locations, there is no uniformity of what the PC hardware is or how they're connected except that every one of our systems are able to connect to the internet. Also, we have no centralized requirement for purchasing and set up. So, a workstation can walk through the door that none of us knows about and we have to figure out how to connect it, get it set up and running, and often times we can use remote control software to actually provide the initial set up on that machine. In addition, many of the county offices have their own IT department and obtain their PCs that way. So, as you can imagine, we have very little control over the infrastructure or over the PCs that we're asked and tasked to support.