What to expect when dealing with ITDI

IT and Digital Infrastructure (ITDI) provide the core IT services which underpin the university.

Services such as Network, Telephony, Video Conferencing (VC), Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and Email.

The department works to a published Service Level Agreement (SLA) and we also maintain agreed policies and procedures for many aspects of the work we carry out. What do these documents mean for you and what service should you expect to receive when you contact ITDI?

When contacting ITDI you should expect:

• To receive a professional, friendly, approachable service from.
• To receive straightforward help that is not full of technical jargon.
• That we will be transparent about issues and try to learn from service failures.
• That we will seek to continuously improve the service we deliver on the basis of feedback we receive.

Some of how we will do this is outlined in the sections below but in addition:

• When you receive responses from ITDI you should expect them to be from a named contact, not a nameless function.
• Any documentation created by ITDI will be available in a number of formats to support our customers.
• Where required ITDI will carry out remote support sessions for staff and students.
• Complaints will receive a formal written response within 5 working days of the complaint being received in writing.

Service level agreement

Our Service Level Agreement (SLA) outlines that we will endeavour to have our services available 99% of the time, that’s 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In an average month that means if a service is unavailable, i.e., where no user can access it, for more than 7 and a half hours in the month, then the service will have failed to meet its availability target.

We have a structure for fixing faults and fulfilling requests, the times for these are dependent on the severity of the problem and the impact it is having.

• For normal faults (affecting just one user) our target is to fix 90% of these within 3 working days, for severe faults (e.g., when a service is unavailable) we aim to fix 90% of these within 4 hours.
• For a standard request, such as a new user account, we aim to fulfil 90% of these within 5 working days.
• We also aim to have 35% of the IT calls coming through the UHI Servicedesk fixed by us without being passed to another team.

Where we intend on undertaking disruptive work we will endeavour to provide 5 working days’ notice of the disruption. Information will be sent out to UHI email accounts and a message may be published on the self-service portal. There will, of course, be occasions when we have to carry out disruptive work on a service and we aren’t able to provide 5 working days’ notice. This will only happen when we deem that there is a high risk of service failure if the work is not carried out immediately, or if another part of our service has already failed and urgent remedial action is required.

Major incidents

Where a service is unavailable for use or use of the service is affected for a large group of users this will be communicated via the following mechanisms:

• An all staff/student email will be issued (assuming the fault is not with email).
• The UHI Servicedesk twitter feed will be updated.
• We may place an update on the self-service portal.

As outlined in the contacting ITDI section this only currently applies during our working hours, however there is a project in place to introduce an out of hours service.

Please note we will spend up to 15 minutes investigating a fault before deciding if it is a major incident, it can then take another 15 minutes to get all sources of information updated to reflect this. We are currently investigating other methods of alerting staff and students to issues.

Where a fault affects one site (such network loss at a College campus), local ICT staff will issue a communication about this.

Please see the ITDI Organisation Chart for detailed look at the structure of the department.