IT Support Systems Week 1

Unit 1 - Discussion Board

Within the Discussion Board area, write 400–600 words that respond to the following questions with your thoughts, ideas, and comments. This will be the foundation for future discussions by your classmates. Be substantive and clear, and use examples to reinforce your ideas:

You recently have been hired as the company’s new IT Director. One of the main projects that you have been tasked with is to establish an IT Help Desk to support the company’s operations. This function does not currently exist, so you will start from the beginning and build it from the ground up.

To begin, you have been asked to identify the anticipated requirements and problems that typical users within your company will face and that the newly created Help Desk will need to address. Take this opportunity to describe the high-level business model of your company and the typical problems (at least 5) faced by users. In addition, describe the anticipated characteristics of the users who will utilize the Help Desk.

Unit 1 - Individual Project

Your company wishes to ensure that the new help desk will be able to handle requests and problems from users at any time of the day; this will play an important part in the structure of the help desk. You also have the understanding that the executive management is keen to be able to support users who are not located at the central office, and as they grow the company, the help desk should be able to support users in remote locations.

Take this opportunity to describe to management a couple of important help desk organizational structures. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of a centralized versus decentralized environment. In addition, describe these various staffing structures:

• Pool
• Dispatch
• Tiered
• Specialized
• Method

Finally, make and offer supporting material for your recommendation about how the help desk you plan to establish will be structured. Be sure to include a recommendation about being centralized or decentralized, and then explain how the staffing structure would be setup.

This first assignment will allow you to establish the Key Assignment Template that will be used throughout the class for all Individual Project submissions and to explore the framework securing an organization’s data.

• Create the template to be used for the submission of all Individual Project assignments.

The template document should follow this format:

• IT Support Systems Project Document Shell
• Use Microsoft Word
• Title Page
  • Course number and name
  • Project name
  • Student name
  • Date
• Table of Contents
  • Auto-generated TOC
  • Separate page
  • Maximum of 3 levels deep
  • Be sure to update the fields of the TOC so that it is up-to-date before submitting your project.
• Section headings (create each heading on a new page with TBD as content, except for sections listed under "New Content" below).
  • Roles and Responsibilities
  • Tools and Technologies
  • IT Systems Support
  • Processes and Problem Resolution
  • Performance Management

Each week, you will add to this document and submit for grading as a preview. Each section will contain the following:

• Roles and Responsibilities (Week 1 IP)
  • Centralized versus decentralized
  • Staffing structures
  • Your recommendation about the structure