In This Chapter
Commission scolaire de la Région-de-Sherbrooke
Computer technology is becoming ubiquitous in schools around the world. Students routinely use computers to research and write papers. Teachers use computer technology when planning lessons, enhancing classroom instruction, and posting assignments. Even some courses starting in middle school teach children how to use a computer for media design. As some of today's students begin using computers at home before they even learn to read, they feel very comfortable with the increasing use of technology. Finding the best way to integrate computer technology equitably across different schools in a community is often a hot topic of debate among educators, but for purposes of this chapter, put the debate aside.
Assuming that all things are equal, how do you maintain classroom technology? You can't have a technician waiting at every school. Besides, more and more computers are arriving while budgets are falling.
In this chapter, we consider the situation of Commission scolaire de la Région-de-Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada. The school board's technology demands were increasing, and expanding the service team wasn't an option. The organization used a service management approach to help it manage and maintain its technology more effectively while still fulfilling its mission.
The Sherbrooke school board serves 20,000 students in Quebec. Its IT group is responsible for maintaining the computer technology in all the region's schools. The service technicians were well trained and good at their jobs, but the school board was facing a problem: The school's budget was falling because fewer students were enrolled, but the number of computers was increasing as technology became an integral part of the learning process. At one point, the IT department actually slowed computer purchases because of maintenance considerations.
Historically, different technicians had serviced different schools. Some of these technicians did everything — even replacing toner cartridges in the printers, planning computer purchases, and supporting software for teachers. Others were more focused on dealing with computer-related problems.
The IT department at the school board realized that it needed to provide quality, uniform service across the schools more effectively. Achieving this goal meant making some painful choices, such as deciding which services would have the best payback and support the school board's mission. Accordingly, IT reorganized the technical support team and implemented a service management strategy to help streamline maintenance.
IT management's first step was tackling inconsistent service. To train the technicians to work together, IT sent them all to a program in which they simulated an airport and had to work together to schedule airplane departures. At first, as typically is the case, the process was chaotic; in other words, the team didn't come together well. The technicians soon realized the importance of organizing to meet a goal, however.
The next step was identifying a set of service management tools to help the team succeed. A service desk was at the top of the list. IT encountered a snag, though: In Quebec, most school-board technicians are part of a union. Implementing a service desk required talking to the union representatives to make sure that they understood the aim of the changes: not to change the job requirements, but to make technicians more efficient. The process took a bit of time, but eventually agreements were shored up, and the team was set to roll.
The team began to deploy its service management strategy with a focus on three key areas:
Asset management
Desktop management
Incident management
A configuration management database (CMDB) stores all the asset information across the schools. Before the CMDB was implemented, the school board kept a semiautomated inventory of all computer-related hardware and software. As the number of computers exploded, keeping the list up to date was a difficult, time-consuming process. After implementing the asset management software, which did automatic discovery, the team had time to engage in more productive work. The tool also gave the management team the information it needed for use in budget planning, such as calculating the computers-to-students ratio for each school.
In addition to getting its hardware under control, IT was interested in managing its software installations more effectively. Instead of having technicians do the work at each site, the team used desktop management software that enabled IT to stream software installations to the school board's computers. This method also allowed IT to track what software was running on the school board's machines. Management refers to this system as "on-demand installation." If someone wants to install a Microsoft product on her machine, for example, she simply chooses it from a menu of supported programs, and the software is installed automatically.
The school board is also trying to deal with incident management more productively. Before the service desk was launched, all the technicians spent a lot of time traveling. Now the team is transitioning to a remote management process, adding technicians to the process one at a time. First, the team asks one technician to do business as usual (such as traveling to different sites) while it monitors him; then the team asks him to do the same type of work remotely.
The school board will end up with a limited number of field workers; the rest of the technicians will work remotely, going to a school only for hardware problems (which must be repaired on-site). This system increases the time that technicians can spend solving requests.
The new process takes some getting used to. For one thing, IT is specifying exactly what the technicians should do. Says Philippe Caron, adjoint director of IT, "People like a gray line because then they can ask a technician to do something that really isn't in his job description. Under the new process, school staff members have to do some things themselves." To help them along, IT is creating self-service documentation for tasks such as changing a printer cartridge.
Caron recommends that organizations begin with a framework to implement change successfully. "When the department of finance makes a decision, it bases its actions on laws. IT should also base its decisions on tangible policies and processes," he says.
After spending a lot of time researching frameworks, IT implemented the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which is a best-practices framework. (For more information about ITIL, see Chapter 5.) Caron's group suggests the following best practices, which Caron calls Think, Read, and Adapt:
Think: This best practice involves considering questions such as how to implement the framework, whether successful applications and processes can be reused, how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of IT services, and how to identify and assess priorities.
Read: Locate some documentation on the process you want to implement, and find examples of business-related experiences that relate to your company. Read as much as you can about the process you want to use.
Adapt: Don't implement a framework directly; framework theories are created to meet many needs. Don't be afraid to implement only the parts of processes that fit your precise needs.
Note
Persuading people inside IT that a framework is needed is fairly easy; persuading others can take a bit longer.
Caron says that every day, people tell him that they're happy with the new service center. Although staff members miss seeing certain technicians at their schools, they like the on-demand service, which means that they don't have to wait for a preassigned service day. The most significant benefit has been enabling the school board to do a better job of achieving its mission: providing the best educational environment for its students so that all of them can learn, excel, and graduate.