7:30am - 9:00am   Coffee and Registration

9:00am - 10:00am   Best Practices and Design Tips for Building a Customer-focused Self-Service Portal
Speaker: Christopher Chagnon, ITSM Application and Web Developer, Worcester Polytechnic Institute 

Before getting started designing an online Self-Service interface or portal, there are some key considerations to understand and address. An experienced web developer, systems integrator, and UX/UI expert, Chris Chagnon will introduce concepts and answers questions around topics such as:
   - Responsive Design
   - Accessibility & Compliance
   - Search Optimization
   - Web Analytics
   - Integrations

10:00am - 10:15am   Break

10:15am – 12:00pm   Tier Zero - Enabling Proactive Support via Self-Service – Show & Tell

Modern IT support portals are interactive applications that enable customers to help themselves, improving the customer experience and reducing IT service delivery costs.  These support portals often enable delivery of core ITSM capabilities such as:
   - Knowledge Management
   - Service Catalog
   - Request Fulfillment
   - Incident Management
   - Outages & Alerts

In this “Show & Tell” style sessions, attendees will see some samples as shared by peer institutions:

WPI IT Services: its.wpi.edu
Presenters:
Christopher Chagnon, ITSM Application and Web Developer, Worcester Polytechnic Institute 
Marie DiRuzza, Director of IT Service Management, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Winner of a “Best Portal Design” award, WPI’s site integrates Service Catalog, Knowledge, News/Alerts, Software catalog, technology-enabled space lookup, Utilities launch-pad and more.

FSU Information Technology Services
Presenter: Deborah Saks, Director of Service Management and Campus Technology, Framingham State University

Framingham has just published the second iteration of its portal. Their initial portal used Cherwell scripts called “one steps” to create a handful of incidents and requests as well as a mediocre knowledge base. The new Portal will be in BETA in December but live at the time of this event.  The new portal will have searchable knowledge (using KCS methodologies) as well as a full searchable service catalog or separate incident and request catalog.

Support Portal Show & Tell @ Mount Holyoke College
Presenter: Aime DeGrenier, Manager Community Technical Support team (CTS), Library, Information and Technology Services (LITS), Mount Holyoke College

Mount Holyoke College has 3 distinct portal initiatives in progress at various organizational levels (functional, departmental and College-wide) where the community can find information service and support.  Aime will be presenting the newly launched integrated Library/IT Mount Holyoke Library, Information and Technology Service (LITS) website and will discuss the user experience and customer service focused development process used. Secondly,  they have been working to build a new Samanage service portal for the Help Desk which - while still in the infancy stages – is built using an ITSM-based framework.  The third, campus-wide SharePoint portal, is also in the early phases of development and use.  Aime will discuss the process, current state, and their search for serenity, alignment and customer service among the crowded runways of information sharing and campus needs.

12:00pm – 1:00pm   Lunch

Optional lunch activity:
Horizon Roundtable Discussion: The future of IT support delivery
How do we as IT Support professionals prepare for the future of IT support delivery?  What is on the horizon and what should we be doing now to prepare?
    - What role will artificial intelligence, chatbots, and virtual  assistants play? 
    - How will omni-channel support change in the next 5-10 years?
    - What other disruptors might exist?

1:00pm – 2:00pm   Journey Mapping: Applying Customer Experience Principles to ITSM
Speaker: Chris Gallacher, Principal Consultant, Forrester’s Business Technology Strategy 

Today’s students and employees are demanding the same choices about technology and services at school and in the workplace as they do at home. Organizations need to focus on going beyond measuring point-in-time satisfaction to delivering an outstanding customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle. In this session, you;ll learn how to apply some of the leading customer experience (CX) principles, tools, and frameworks to help design IT services from the outside-in. Through real-life examples and techniques, you’ll discover how personas, journey mapping, and communication strategies can help your organization deliver a great experience

2:10pm – 3:00pm   Defining Customer-focused IT Services
Speaker: Marie DiRuzza, Director of IT Service Management, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Many IT organizations struggle to define the services they provide because they focus on what they do and not on what customers need.  This session will challenge common approaches and provide guidance to help IT organizations take a more customer-focused approach.

Drawing from industry experts and the EDUCAUSE ECAR Service Model for Higher Education, this presentation will touch on techniques to use to ensure that IT Services meet customer needs. 

3:05pm – 4:30pm   Defining Customer-Focused IT Services (Activity)
Facilitator: Marie DiRuzza, Director of IT Service Management, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Working in small groups, we will focus on identifying desired customer outcomes and defining what IT Services enable those outcomes.  We will then define one or more IT Services in a customer-focused way.

Once we have identified a few IT Services, we will use a litmus test to ensure the IT Services we defined meet the criteria for customer-focused IT Services.

4:30pm   End