University of Washington

SERVING YOU BETTER Best Practices, Better Service Creating a shared vision of great service across UW's diverse IT community UW Computing Directors Betsy Tippens, Mark Baratta, Barb Prentiss, and Scott Barker work together to provide better service. B etsy Tippens, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Information Technologies at UW Bothell, remembers a time when getting great service from UW-IT depended way too much on knowing who to call. "When I started working here 13 years ago," Tippens recalled, "I felt like I needed an org chart. Who worked in central IT? What were they responsible for? If you didn't know, it could be challenging to get the service you needed." That's all changed, thanks to UW-IT's online Service Catalog, which makes it easy to find what's offered, how much it costs, and how long it will take to activate the service. "The Service Catalog made a real difference in my life," Tippens said. "The people behind the services are still really important—but I no longer need to go to them directly." UW-IT's Service Catalog is just one highly visible element of a major, multi-year effort within the organization to adopt the world's most widely used IT service best practices framework. Called the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), this framework is a comprehensive guide for providing great service from the time a need is identified until the service is retired. UW-IT has expanded this effort to improve collaboration with IT professionals across the University by offering them ITIL best practices training. This training is helping to change the IT landscape across campus, according to Barb Prentiss, School of Medicine Director of Information Technology. Almost 90 IT professionals from across 10 UW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY the UW participated in the UW-IT–sponsored ITIL Foundations training; 30 were from 13 academic departments in the School of Medicine. "We're now having conversations with UW-IT at a level of understanding and enthusiasm we never had before," Prentiss said. "I really like the ITIL part of the equation. It helps so much to have a clearly defined direction that's nimble enough to change." ITIL training is also having an impact at the College of Built Environments. It's helping their IT staff face the challenge of rapidly changing technology, according to Director of Computing, Mark Baratta. "Having ITIL as a framework to think about change is helping us move toward a world where we're becoming a community of practice—rather than being the IT guys in the basement who know what magic to perform," Baratta said. Scott Barker, Director of Information Technology at the Information School, agrees. "Fundamentally, with ITIL, we're all going to be able to provide much better service to students and faculty," Barker said. "UW-IT has done many different things to improve services across the University over the last several years. ITIL is one part of that." "ITIL gives us a framework to work in partnership across the University in ways we've never done before," said Erik Lundberg, UW-IT's Assistant Vice President for IT Services & Strategic Sourcing. "It's a continuous cycle of improvement, with ITIL helping us to manage our services and keep making them better."

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