Working with IT Partners

Who are our IT Partners?

Some of the schools, colleges, or departments on campus employ their own IT support staff. These IT Partners are located onsite, embedded in the areas they support. IT Partners provide a wide range of support for their clients, including help desk functionality, desktop support, support for specialized line of business applications, and server/systems support. IT Partners focus on support for faculty and staff, and usually have more limited options for the student population, although the levels of service differ per Partner in that regard.

While our IT Partners are not officially part of IS&T, we work closely with them, value their input, and consider them part of our team in spirit. We’re all here with the same goal in mind – to provide excellent IT support to the BU community.

The list of all IT Partners can be found on SharePoint. Additionally, the list of IT Partner support streams can still be found on TechWeb. You should use these lists when routing tickets to IT Partners that ended up in the IT Help Center by mistake.

If you are trying to determine whether a client on a ticket is an IT Partner, or if you you need to personally contact an IT Partner staff member, use the Excel document which can be found on TechInternal or on SharePoint.

How can I identify a ticket from an IT Partner in ServiceNow?

Tickets can be identified one of two ways:

1. Client Red Flag Note

IT Partners are all flagged in ServiceNow for easier identification:

IT Partner Red Flag Note

If a ticket has a client with this flag, it means an IT Partner submitted a ticket to IS&T asking for additional assistance.

2. Client Department Field

If an IT Partner is using ServiceNow as its ticketing tool, they may pass tickets to IS&T within the system. When that happens, the client on the ticket is not the IT Partner, but the actual end user/client. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to check the client’s Department field when triaging a ticket. If the Department listed is one that is supported by an IT Partner, be sure to review the notes carefully to see if one of our Partners escalated the ticket to us and performed Level 1 troubleshooting.

Currently, these IT Partners teams are using ServiceNow as a ticketing system and pass us tickets in this way: Metropolitan College IT (MET IT), ESO IT (ENSA – Service Desk), SMG Information Tech Services (SMG-ITS), and the Alumni Medical Library (BUMC – Alumni Medical Library).  The BUMC IT teams are also using ServiceNow (BUMC – Service Desk is the primary assignment group).

Client with an IT Partner Departmental Affiliation (in this case, MET)

I’ve identified that a ticket is from an IT Partner. What should I do next?

As the red flag note states, when we receive a ticket from one of our IT Partners, we should assume that they have done the appropriate troubleshooting and escalate the ticket immediately to the correct IS&T group. Initial triage questions such as “Did you try a different outlet?” or “Did you try rebooting the computer?” are redundant and frustrating to our Partners, and needlessly lengthen time to resolution for our clients.

Additionally, we should not “boomerang” tickets back to our IT Partners when they’ve come to us for help. Read the initial description and additional notes in the ticket to make the appropriate determination about whether a client has reached out to IS&T by mistake, and needs to be routed to his/her local IT group, or the ticket is being escalated from an IT Partner and should be handled by someone in IS&T.

Remember, our IT Partners provide many services for their clients, including desktop support.  Standard desktop support procedures, including ruling out software/desktop issues as the cause of an incident, are handled by our IT Partners and do not require Desktop Services’ involvement.  This means tickets from them should usually bypass both the Service Desk and Desktop Services, unless the clients are asking specifically for assistance in areas we specialize in, such as account issues or our desktop asset management tool, KACE.

IS&T escalation groups (e.g. System Engineering, Network Services) can and should work directly with our IT Partners. IS&T escalation groups do not need to pass these tickets back to the Service Desk or Desktop Services.