When I came to Mines in June 2022, I wanted to understand the culture in ITS (Information and Technology Solutions). Were we providing timely, reliable, and professional engagement with our customers? Were we able to solve problems and work through tough decisions without getting caught in the spiral of overanalyzing only to find we missed deadlines? Are we solving problems with one-off solutions that create complexity and do not solve the root cause? Do our customers want to partner with us, or do they see us as more of a barrier to their success?

These are tough questions that we need to ask as leaders. Maybe not surprisingly, some of the answers were good and some not so good. “It depends” is what I started to understand. Inconsistency may be the best way to describe our culture.

We had good customer feedback through the ticket-closed survey that went to one in five customers. My experience told me that those who receive good service love to tell us. That is great! But those who receive less than ideal service sometimes do not want to “get anyone in trouble,” so some surveys may be ignored, skewing the data.

One way to assess our current ITS practices is to look at open ticket metrics from oldest to newest; Our oldest open tickets were from 2019. Yes, ITS had open tickets from three years ago. Some tickets were resolved but not closed. Others, however, still needed to be resolved and sat idle. Some were passed to team members but then never carried through to resolution, showing breakdowns between our different ITS groups. This means we are not always working as a cohesive team to solve problems together for better outcomes for our customers.

As a result of this review, the ITS leadership team is now proactively reviewing the oldest open tickets to uncover ITS process issues and bring to light obstacles our team faces with solving customer issues in a timely manner. This simple step has already started to change our culture with aging open tickets now viewed with a critical eye.

Instead of one in five customers giving feedback, now every customer can fill out a survey on how their experience went. I encourage you to fill it out – good, bad, or ugly – because it will give ITS insights on what we need to focus on to ensure timely, reliable, and professional engagement with our customers.

Your input is appreciated and can be shared directly with me at andrewjmoore@mines.edu.

Thanks,
Andrew, CIO (Chief Information Officer)