| Albemarle
County Public Schools |
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Background
Albemarle County is located approximately 110 miles southwest of
Washington, DC and 70 miles west of Richmond, VA., and at 726 square
miles is the fifth largest county in Virginia. Their IT
department supports all of the elementary, middle and high schools
in the county, with approximately 100 administrator seats and
approximately 2300 end users. Ensuring requests are managed
efficiently and executed in a timely manner to these twenty six
schools is essential to this department.
Situation
Albemarle had a tracking tool in place to manage requests, but
request and time was lost due to poor a authentication process which
did not allow teachers access to the system. Prior to using
the Novo software, each school had an on-site troubleshooter who
tried to resolve requests himself, and was the single person to send
IT requests to the central IT office. Teachers needing IT
support had to locate this single point of contact to make a
request. Requests simply did not get logged and often fell
through the cracks. The previous system was inefficient and became a
burden on a single person to be the go-between for all of the
communication between teachers at the various schools and the
central IT office.
Strategy
Albemarle needed a tracking solution that allowed end users to be
automatically authenticated into a system and to easily submit their
own requests. This would not only streamline the request
process, but to ensure that all requests were being logged.
The IT management team selected the Novo Help Desk Enterprise
software with the Active Directory Module. The Novo
Active Directory module features single sign-on permissions for
technicians as well as end users. This allowed teachers to
easily log their own requests and the Novo software then notifies
the local IT troubleshooter at each school. If this “first
tier” technician cannot resolve the issue, then the Albemarle’s
central IT department is notified and can see these requests and
manage them in their main Help Desk queue.
Results
The Novo Help Desk has helped to streamline processes and has made
it very easy for the teachers to create their own requests.
Now, all of the requests are not falling in one person’s lap where
they could potentially fall through the cracks. The Novo
system is also saving the step of the teachers having to go to the
troubleshooter to ask them to log the request; instead they can
submit requests at their own convenience. Albemarle states “we
have had a successful deployment and with Novo, our support workflow
process is working much better than before.”
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