Developing An IT Support Strategy For Aotearoa Technology College Essay.

Read the case study and develop your IT support strategy.

Aotearoa Technology College is planning on opening campuses in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, and Christchurch next year.  ATC hopes to have 1,000 students studying their computer courses. Of these 400 will be in Auckland and 200 in each of the other centres.  The college has already signed an agreement with a computer manufacturer to lease computer equipment including computers, printers and other peripherals. This agreement includes the maintenance of the leased equipment.  However the college will need to purchase its own servers and networks and maintain these itself.  ATC hopes to hire a director for the IT Support Centre with several team leaders.  The help desk teams will include students who will work at the centre while they are studying.

Your manager has asked you to write an IT support strategy that will support ATC equipment and its software, staff and students.

In particular, you need to investigate and make a recommendation in these four sections.

1. Design a job description for the Help desk operators.  
2. Develop a code of ethics that they will need to abide by.
3. Recommend what software they need to purchase to manage the incident management process
4. Design the physical layout of the Support Centre keeping in mind that the centre needs to offer support to each campus.

Development of job description for the Help desk operators

The report depicts the importance of implementing proper network as well as server implementation for developing the system architecture of Aotearoa Technology College. In order to gain competitive advantages and at the same time for effective revenue the Aotearoa Technology College authority is willing to open four different college campuses respectively in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, and Christchurch in the coming year. For the successful implementation of the system support of IT and strategies are required to be considered. However in order to conduct the monitoring and survey approaches of these four campuses it is necessary to develop network architecture as well as a secured server. With the help of a secured server the management and the authorized users will be able to access the information stored in the data server. After considering the blueprint, it has been found that, they are expecting to have 1000 students all round. Among them 400 will be in the Auckland branch and for the rest of the branches 200 students are expected to be accommodated.   

In order to lease the computer equipments in terms of computer, printers, and many other peripherals it is necessary to sign an agreement to the computer manufacturer. However, the responsibilities just not get over after the implementation of the network architecture but also maintenance is another important part that is strictly required to be considered by the system developers and by the. For the help desk operators job descriptions is requiring to be developed and on the other hand a code of ethics is required to be conducted that is needed to be abided are also illustrated in this report. Even in order to manage the incident management approaches properly, accurate software are needed to be purchased by the system developer of Aotearoa Technology College. Considering the requirement of the entire centre, a physical centre is needed to ne developer and that is also elaborated in this report.

The help desk is a specialized job description that is optimized for the posting of online job boards rather career pages and it is very much easier for the company customization (Conger, 2015). While conducting the research approach the advantage and disadvantages of help desk job description and the responsibilities of help desk specialists are also elaborated. The responsibilities of help desk specialists are as follows:

1. It can effectively provide the first level contact to the consumer issues. Just after the contact it can also convey the resolution to the customers.
2. The escalating and unresolved queries can be forwarded to the next level of IT desk support with the help of the help desk job description the users can efficiently access the information (Sykes, 2015).
3. With the help of this approach the tracking, routing and at the same time the redirecting issues could be conducted towards correct resources.

The responsibilities of the system are as follows:

1. The initial responsibility of the system is to serve a first level contact and to convey that resolution to the consumers.
2. In the next level of support the properly escalate and unresolved queries could be forwarded.
3. The responsibility of the system is to redirect the problems from the wrong towards the correct resources.
4. It can update the information of the consumers and can also produce the activity reports accurately.
5. Throughout the problem solving approaches, the customers could walk through.
6. It helps the system developers to keep on connected to the customers so that they can provide feedback as per the requirement of the customers (Beatty, Arnett & Liu, 2015). Not only this, but also the problems are needed to resolved from the feedback generated by the users of the business organization. In order to exceed the desire of the consumers the skills of the customer and the service of the service providers are required to be provided by the system developers.

Customer satisfaction: The main advantage of the help desk job description is it could provide high level satisfaction to the consumers. Due to the clear visibility of the job description in the company website and in the product brochures the users will be able to access the desired information (Chunpir & Ludwig, 2014). However, there are enterprises that outsource their help desk services to the offshore companies. Due to lack of trained staffs and longer wait time management the customer might get dissatisfied from the help desk services.    

Quality improvement: The overall quality of a system can be completely improved with the hep if the system. The product quality and services served by the business enterprises can be improved with the help of the job description. The identified issues can be mitigated from the core management areas, if the customers call the help desk specialists. In order to track and tabulate the reports accurately the companies can utilize proper software system. In order to implement the improvements the users the problems can be reviewed by the designers.   

Advantages and disadvantages of the system

Communication error: If the company fails to possess accurate communication skills then, the organization will fail to keep the connection along with strong client facing components (Agyapong et al., 2014).

Lack of multitasking skills: If the management fails to adopt accurate advanced troubleshooting and multitasking skills then, the service provider will not be able to provide the desired outcome.

While developing the network architecture for the college it is very much necessary to develop the standard code of ethics. The two policy principle developed for the concept is as follows:

Honesty and integrity are referred to as one the most important factors that are required to be considered by the management authority while developing the network architecture. If they fail to do such then the entire system might get corrupted with the external attackers (Shahri et al., 2014). On the other hand, if they avail this approaches then the entire process will give measurable benefit to the system develops and to the college authority also. The employees who will work as the system developers must be sincere and honest at the same time (Council,  2013). However many advantages and disadvantages are associated to it.

With the help of the code of ethics the college management authority can make proper decision making and the comprehensive guidelines could enhance the employee’s awareness and commitment towards the code. In a small business the foundation can give effective internal as well as external decision making power (Pirrone & Trainor, 2015). A strong code of ethics might guide the college from the external attackers. Even in day to day decision making this approach is also very much helpful.  

At the same time, if company fails to adopt accurate code of ethics then from the ethical aspect the college authority will face major level of failure. On the other hand, security is referred to as one of the most important factor that is strictly required to be considered by the management authority (Hejazi, Halpin & Biggs, 2014). Due to lack of security concern the external attackers will easily come and hijack the information stored in the data server of the business organization.   

In order to manage large set of data the recommended software that the college management authority must afford is the SAP ERP. It will help the authority to possess effective decision making.

All the business functionalities could get integrated and the organizational efficiency will be enhanced and business process can be managed properly after the adoption of ERP solution. In order to manage and track the system capability SAP provides single interface to the system developers (Iriberri, Kwon & Henson, 2015). The network level transaction and processes can be automated and  due to the system integration the users will be able to access information from the server regardless of time and location as well.  

As the budget of the authority is not as mush higher as the large businesses thus, implementation of SAP will be expensive while purchasing and maintaining the system. The system is very much complex and due to the extreme level complexity most of the small organizations might not adjust with the SAP ERP (Hejazi et al., 2014). For the maintenance expert team is needed if the authority fails to adopt expert team then it will be a major disadvantage for Aotearoa Technology College.

Development of code of ethics that they are required to be abide

The suggested network is represented below which will be beneficial for Aotearoa Technology College to manage their different branches throughout. In this suggested network architecture the routers, Ethernet hub, Ethernet switch and firewall are incorporated (Leicester, 2016). The advantages and disadvantages of the support centre are as follows:

With the help of proper network architecture, the entire system will be secured from the external attackers and at the same time, due to the application firewall only the authorized users will be access information from the server (Wang et al., 2015). For the presence of SAP ERP the data could be integrated perfectly.

                                              Figure 1: Network architecture for Aotearoa Technology College

                                                                               (Source: Jo et al., 2015, pp-55)

If the authority fails to implement proper VPN and firewall then the external users can easily access the information from the serer without any kind of error (Jin et al., 2013). On the other hand of they fail to install proper security encryption keys then it will be again a major failure to Aotearoa Technology College.

Conclusion 

From the overall discussion it has been found that it is necessary for Aotearoa Technology College to develop network architecture accurately that could help to monitor and control the overall system of all the branches including Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, and Christchurch. Not only this, but also IT help desk is another important aspect that has been considered by the project manager and by the management authority of the college to control and monitor the system. The role of IT support and IT strategies are also illustrated in this report and in order to develop the network architecture the network developers are needed to consider different network alignment strategies. Before conducting the network structure selection of proper code of ethics should also be considered. In order to conduct the network system it is necessary to understand the system both the software and hardware requirement. The report has represented a network layout for Aotearoa Technology College which will be helpful for both the network and IT infrastructure. The advantages and disadvantages of help desk, software architecture and other approaches are also elaborated in this report. It is expected that the newly developed architecture will be able to serve the expected outcome of Aotearoa Technology College.

In order to mitigate the issues associated to IT help desk and network architecture that might hamper the expected system execution it is necessary to provide certain recommendations to Aotearoa Technology College. The recommendations for Aotearoa Technology College are as follows:

Advantages and disadvantages of the code of ethics

Development of proper security approaches:  In order to mitigate the security issues it is necessary for the system developer to consider certain security approaches. With proper security approach the only the authenticated users will be able to access information from the data server. However due to lack of security implementation any external users could access data from the server and also can misuse them which is referred to as one of the very harmful issues.

Development of training and development programs: In order to mitigate the issues of IT support system and IT strategies it is necessary for the system developers to implement certain training and development programs for the system developers. It helps the system developers to conduct the network and computer manufacturing approaches properly. Not only this, but also for understand the advantages and disadvantages of the network system and computer manufacturing approach system it is necessary for the system developers to conduct the proper networking oriented training and development programs. However, before successful implementation, it is necessary to conduct alternative IT networking and IT support system as well.  

Consideration of code of ethics: For the system developers it is necessary to consider the standard code of ethics. It will be helpful for the system developers. With the help of the ethical consideration the developers will be able to develop network architecture accurately.

References

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