Support Services

FY2024 Accomplishments

Throughout FY2024, the ITS Support Services team offered direct support for the everyday technology needs of the U-M community and delivered enormous value by managing and supporting large-scale technology services. The team, consisting of the Service Center, End User Services, Service Support, Customer Relations, Tech Shop, and Campus Tech, delivers various campus-facing services and supports all ITS services through chat, email, phone, and walk-up assistance.

Serving faculty, staff, and students across the Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses, as well as Michigan Medicine and thousands of community members, Support Services staff are integrated within the units they serve, regularly attending staff events and meetings and interacting with faculty daily. Particularly over the past year, Support Services distinguished itself through its peerless collaboration with the Accessibility/Assistive Tech teams, the Emerging Technology team, and numerous other university departments.

Strengthening Foundations for Digital Accessibility at U-M

Over the past year, U-M has made considerable strides in enhancing digital accessibility, and the ITS Support Services team has been a vital part of that work. The establishment of the university’s Digital Accessibility Liaison (DAL) Network in FY2024 marks a significant achievement in promoting the university's accessibility policy and ensuring comprehensive support across all units, colleges, and campuses. This growing network empowers liaisons to effectively lead digital accessibility efforts within their respective units and serve as the first point of contact for inquiries while also providing a channel to escalate complex issues.

Support Services also initiated a large-scale accessibility monitoring system for applications, using a custom TeamDynamix database, collecting key data to inform our strategies and meet reporting requirements. Additionally, the team has successfully introduced accessibility metadata for 86 ITS services and launched new internal training and process integration, setting a benchmark for including accessibility in service management.

Service Expansion in FY2024

One of the most exciting aspects of FY2024 has been the launch of the U-M Gen AI Services, including U-M GPT and U-M Maizey, which were able to be created by the ITS Emerging Technology team thanks in large part due to the organizational and technical support provided by ITS Support Services.

In addition, several other ITS services - managed by Support Services - have continued sustained growth this past year. Here are some highlights:

  • TeamDynamix (TDX) onboarded 9 new groups to their own TDX applications, bringing the number of individual applications to over 40 across UM-Ann Arbor, Flint, and Dearborn, as well as some Michigan Medicine teams. Since the service launched in May 2020, TDX has helped U-M manage over 6 million tickets.

  • The Zoom Rooms service has continued to expand quickly this past year, adding 20% more sign-ins since July 1, 2023. There are approximately 350 Zoom Rooms installed at the moment.

  • Central Campus’ MCard ID station transitioned to Support Service’s Tech Help from Student Life in January 2024 and served more than 2,000 customers in the first two months.

  • The Campus Computing Sites poster printing service volume has increased almost 400% since before the pandemic and is on pace to print over 40,000 linear feet this past fiscal year. Large-format full-color posters are a popular tool to summarize research and the results of academic projects.

  • The ITS Accessibility team purchased a new license for leading screen reader and magnification programs &emdash; JAWS (screen reader), ZoomText (magnifier), and Fusion (both tools combined in one). These programs are now available to any active faculty, staff, and students across U-M's four campuses via MiWorkspace Software Center or folders on U-M Google Drive.

Supporting Service Excellence

The Support Services team developed and launched Service Excellence training for new ITS staff in FY2024, releasing self-paced TDX ticket training as well as implementing training for new Service Owners and Managers, of whom 13 were onboarded this fiscal year.

The Service Roadmap team was founded and put in place the Service Roadmap process to systematically evaluate ITS services for updates, retirements, or replacements. The Service Governance Group, sponsored and facilitated by Support Services, launched 6 new services and retired 8 services last year. A new model for managing service data was developed, which allows teams to manage data related to their areas of responsibility in one central ITS service catalog managed in TDX. Teams onboarded to this collaborative model include: PMO Ops Team, Digital UX team, Disaster Recovery Planning Team, and the Accessibility Team.

Support Services: Leading the Way with the Google Storage Project

In 2021, Google announced a storage model change that involved no longer offering free, unlimited storage to accounts using their services, including higher education institutions like U-M. As a result, this change required storage limits to be placed on every account across the entire U-M domain.

In 2022, after a careful review of U-M Google storage usage and in collaboration with Unit IT teams across the university, the ITS Support Services team was able to implement a 250GB limit for active faculty, staff, and students and a 15GB limit for alumni and retirees. Contextually, this approach to Google storage is much larger than most higher education institutions, with others offering between 5GB and 100GB to active affiliates. In addition, most institutions do not allow their alumni and retirees to retain their Google accounts, which U-M does.

Because of this decision, the new storage limits directly affected less than 3% of all active faculty, staff, and students (~1400) and less than 10% of all alumni and retirees (~28k).

Beginning in 2023, over the course of more than 15 months, ITS Support Services helped guide the university community through implementing Google’s new storage limits. This was a massive undertaking.

Support Services provided the U-M community with custom-built tools and detailed documentation to move data from one service to another, to identify content shared with others that they own, and to assist in offboarding individuals who leave the university to ensure no university data is lost. ITS also offered dashboards and office hours to Unit IT to assist them in identifying and working with individuals within their units who needed to take action on their accounts.

Thanks to Support Services and the U-M's community's diligent efforts to declutter and streamline data stored within their accounts, ITS was able to successfully size our environment to match Google’s storage policy changes and built a sustainable lifecycle for the future.

Laser Focus on Customer Service in FY2024

Providing exceptional customer service is the cornerstone of Support Services' mission. As the primary interface of ITS for many individuals, Support Services handles hundreds of thousands of tickets annually. It has achieved a global leadership position in managing tickets throughout our organization. This year, ITS Support Services has observed remarkable improvements across the board.

In FY2024, there was significant progress in the management of ITS tickets and the enhancement of customer service. This includes a dramatic improvement in every key performance indicator (KPI) over the past year—aging tickets have been halved from 134 to 68, aging VIP incidents have been eliminated, and there has been a reduction in both non-VIP incidents and tickets awaiting customer information. The improvements in ARC services particularly stand out as a key contributor to this success.