Be Our Guest: Crafting a Magical Client Experience

The Client Services team of Valparaiso University’s IT department found inspiration in Disney’s guest service models and has been building a culture of superior service throughout IT. Come along on a magic carpet ride to discover how this new world is transforming delivery of technological services to the campus. From Help Desk to training to assessment, we are increasing satisfaction levels among campus constituents as we meet their needs. We will show how we created a guest service compass that guides our decision-making and service delivery. Further, we will share areas where we learned we were creating our own obstacles in empowering staff to provide service to our guests and how we improvement

Pursuing the Peak of Excellence: Wiki as a Knowledge Base

The pursuit of excellent communication is a path not easily navigated. Challenges arise at every turn, and the greatest obstacle of all is ensuring availability and accuracy of information. Help Desk representatives are the first point of contact for customers placing technology requests and they must have a broad range of knowledge about services provided by the department. A large amount of time is spent in training staff members to achieve the desired level of expertise. At Valparaiso University these staff members are students, adding to the complexity of information sharing as these staff members are only employed for a few years before graduating and entering “the real world.” Having a knowledge base is one way to reduce the amount of time needed to train staff members, as information is easily accessible. The Valparaiso University IT Help Desk has been on an ongoing journey to find a knowledge base and after investigating different solutions we have settled on a wiki. At SIGUCCS’07 we described the process of selecting our solution and our anticipated use of the wiki. By October 2008 we will have had over one year of using the wiki, including populating data, keeping it up-to-date, and training staff on its use. Come and look at the journey we have traveled thus far and explore with us the growing potential of this tool as the map of the terrain grows larger with each passing week

Creating Pathways to Develop Student Professionalism - A New Direction

The 2007-2008 academic year brought a new program of student employment to our IT department called IT Fellows. This program brings together the technological skills of IT along with soft business skills to assist our student employees in becoming well-rounded individuals fully prepared for life after college. In previous years our primary area of student employment was the Help Desk in which there was a tiered system in place with opportunities for resume and interview experience, raises, and promotions. The area of training needed further development and the move to the new program provided enhanced opportunities for training at all levels of employment. First-year candidates attend a week-long Leadership Academy, followed by a full year of training in four six-week rotations of their choice, after which they interview for year-long assignments as interns. Internship opportunities are provided in all areas of the department as well as some campus departments outside of IT, and provide transcript credit for them to carry forward in their prospective careers. As they progress, some upper-class Fellows become mentors, coaches, managers, and trainers themselves. All Fellows participate in educational seminars throughout the year which address many areas of technology and professionalism. Come journey with us as we explore the new terrain of students as colleagues, and the benefits of expanding time staff as well as student employees

Reduce Response Time: Get Hooked on a Wiki

Managing the flow of information both within the IT department and to our customers is one of our greatest challenges in the Office of Technology Information at Valparaiso University. To be successful, IT staff first need to acquire the right information from colleagues to provide excellent service. Then, the staff must determine the most effective way to communicate that information to internal and external customers to encourage the flow of information. To advance the IT department’s goals, how best can we utilize “information” and “communication” vehicles to exchange information, improve workflow, and ultimately communicate essential information to our internal and external customers? We’ve asked ourselves this question and have resolved that “information” and “communication” need to work cooperatively! How better than with a wiki? Recent changes in departmental structure gave us the opportunity to examine our communication vehicles—specifically the software tools we use to facilitate the flow of information. Our previous knowledge base, First Level Support, a module of the HEAT support software produced by FrontRange Solutions, once met our needs as an internal knowledge base solution. We realized we had outgrown FLS and needed a more robust alternative. Our student employees asked for a newer, more interactive method of sharing information. With the assistance of our UNIX systems administrator, we investigated various options and decided to implement the MediaWikiTM system. As we had anticipated, use of this wiki system reduced the response time a customer must wait for an answer to their inquiry. What we didn’t realize was that utilization of the wiki would meet many more needs than we had anticipated. It has also helped us meet other departmental needs, such as increased collaboration, an online knowledge base, and a training tool for staff. Come see how a sprinkle of pixie dust improved communication through adoption of the wiki, and brought information to the forefront of our operations

Google Apps for Education: Valparaiso University\u27s Migration Experience

Many campuses are investigating cloud-based or hosted email solutions. This paper will cover Valparaiso University’s decision to move to the Google Apps for Education platform and our campus migration strategy. Google Apps offers significant savings in both cost of service and cost of support / maintenance while simultaneously offering functionality improvements to the campus experience over our previous system. Valparaiso University was using the GroupWise email and calendaring system and began the process of migrating all of campus to the Google Apps for Education platform in early 2011. Our process began with a student led evaluation team to select the new platform and started rolling out to new students beginning summer of 2011 with migration of existing students conducted from July 2011 through October 2011. Faculty / Staff migration began in December 2011 and were rolled out on a department by department basis throughout the spring 2012 Semester. Heavy promotion and utilization of multiple “Meet Google Apps” presentations greatly enhanced communication about the process and reduced migration anxiety. Apps were limited during migration process to those that reproduced existing system functionality to avoid over-taxing IT support resources. Valparaiso University’s migration process has been refined several times and overall feedback from students, faculty, and staff has been very positive throughout the process

Learning from the Past and Looking to the Future: A Conversation between Pamela Tate and Robert Deahl about the Past 35 Years in Adult Learning

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1/m1/m Corrections for Orbitally Excited Heavy Mesons and the 1/21/2 - 3/23/2 Puzzle

We re-investigate the effects of the $1/m_c$ corrections on the spectrum of the lowest orbitally excited $D$-meson states. We argue that one should expect the $1/m_c$ corrections to induce a significant mixing between the two lowest lying $1^+$ states. We discuss the implications of this mixing and compute its effect on the semileptonic decays $B \to D^{**} \ell \bar{\nu}$ and the strong $D^{**}$ decays.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure