Numara Software, Inc. - Service Desk Mangement Solutions

Continuing a trend of contract wins in the important education sector, Numara® Software, Inc., a leader in service desk management solutions, announced today that the rapidly expanding further education and training establishment, Milton Keynes College, is to upgrade its existing solution, Numara® Track-It!®, to the latest version.

Improving processes is a continual driver within the education sector, where wider education and sporting facilities and more students mean an increasing volume of IT demands from an array of users eager to have their support needs met. This in turn leads to growing complexity for the help desk.

In the case of Milton Keynes College, which has campus sites at Bletchley, Chaffron Way and Kiln Farm, that means a help desk serving the support requirements of over 15,000 students and 1,500 staff, managing and closing over 10,000 support calls a year, or 800 calls a month, with a small IT department that only comprises 18 staff.

The College’s growing activities – it is in partnership with the University of Bedfordshire and recently swept the Board in a national competition to find the best young designers in the UK –have increased the workload on the help desk, leading to the decision by the College to upgrade the Numara Track-It! solution it has used for the last four years to the latest version. Peter Drage, IT manager for Milton Keynes College, takes up the story:

“Most of our systems run on a Wintel platform with Wintel services, although we do have some Linux® applications. We have a mix of PCs and Macs, and for many years the Macs were effectively outside the scope of IT. Now that we have upgraded our help desk software, we can deliver a comprehensive service to all our users irrespective of the operating system they use.”

One of the key benefits of the Numara Track-It! solution is its self service facility which enables users to help themselves. Around 30 percent of incidents and problems within the College are now handled via self service, with Milton Keynes having a long term goal of removing email completely as a means of communication with the help desk. In future, Drage hopes, everyone will work through the self service interface.

“The demands on the help desk can vary from the simplest - and most frustrating – of requests such as password resets to managing quite sophisticated IT projects. The quicker we move users to self service, the more efficient and effective our support will become.”

The key features of Numara Track-It! which Milton Keynes College is keen to adopt include a newly redesigned user interface which, as well as being intuitive and easy to use, provides accountability and visibility both for the IT department and for the College. A customisable management dashboard means the IT department has a complete view across the College’s 22 sites: 11 education venues and 11 Milton Keynes area prisons where the College supports a number of local training initiatives.

This volume of sites and the range of the College’s activities mean its support needs now resemble the demands of a growing business, as Drage explains:

“Sometimes we forget that the size and scale of our IT requirements are equivalent to those of a medium-sized enterprise. The number of sites we support and the number of students and staff means we are no small outfit.”

Looking ahead, the College is keen to develop the interface between Numara Track-It! and Microsoft® Active Directory™, as well as cherry picking the elements of the ITIL® best practice framework most applicable to the organisation. Having been a Numara Track-It! user for over four years, Drage expects the College’s relationship with Numara Software to continue to be a strong one.

“Numara Track-It! is an excellent product and does exactly what you want and more. It is also extremely competitively priced, which has always been a key consideration for the College. We have a very strong relationship with Numara Software which is why we have not looked to switch to other vendors, and I expect that relationship to continue in the future.”

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