Behind the Scenes with Information Technology Services

Empire State University’s success as an online university is sustained, in large part, by the work of Information Technology Services (ITS)—an office made of six internal divisions, ranging from user experience to business affairs and communications. Learn about some of the office’s responsibilities, initiatives, and objectives through the experiences of three staff members in this new segment of Behind the Scenes.  

Eric Grignon is deputy chief information officer (CIO) and assistant vice president of IT and has been at Empire State University since November 2021. Van White is a CRM architect and joined the university three years ago, though he is new to his role at ITS. Allison Bloome is the senior service desk technician, and has been at the university for two years, with the last six months being in her current position.

What does a typical workday look like for you?

Grignon: A typical workday for me has a lot of meetings. Many of these meetings are collaborating directly with ITS and SUNY Empire staff and leadership to ensure that we are working toward the priorities of the institution while continuing to maintain services that keep the university running.

One of my primary responsibilities as deputy CIO is to be involved in the executive decision process, informing leadership on the capacity and availability of IT resources and staffing. Many of my meetings involve building relationships across divisions of the university and externally with our partners, vendors, and suppliers. By building and maintaining these relationships, I can free up our IT staff to do the work that is most beneficial to the institution while I remove barriers and provide answers.

Bloome: I imagine that our workdays look vastly different from one another. For me, a typical workday involves responding to support tickets from students, faculty, and staff. We also take phone calls, live chat, and email as additional ways of reaching out. A lot of those issues range from password resets and multi-factor authentication setups to software troubleshooting—sometimes even some light hardware diagnosis and help with network issues. The Service Desk also assists with monitoring system alerts and collaboration with other ITS teams as we escalate tickets to resolve them.

White: A typical day for me involves doing support work around the CRM, which stands for customer relationship management. We think about it as student relationship management. A CRM system is a great way to take a lot of manual tasks you may do every day, whether it’s data entry or having to navigate multiple screens to find a certain piece of information … and set up processes to reduce the amount of time you spend doing mundane things, giving you the time back to build relationships with students.

So, managing data integration from our enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like Self-Service Banner, Brightspace, and others we have, such as tutoring software, and doing a lot of CRM work for Student Support and Outreach, but overall … managing the CRM strategy for the university as a whole. Looking at the Office of Admissions, the Office of Student Support and Outreach, the Office for Advancement, and saying, ‘What are the needs here? What system do we need in place to meet those needs, and how should it be programmed?’

Essentially, every CRM system is a blank slate, so when it’s adopted, the institution needs to build it out to make it work for you. A lot of my days, I have conversations like that, doing a needs analysis, testing, and then delivering a final product to an office or group of users who are looking to be more efficient.

What would you say your office’s primary goals are?

Grignon: ITS’s primary goal is to serve as a strategic partner for the institution. We do this by providing high-quality, reliable, and available technology solutions, support, and guidance to the university community. To accomplish this, we have developed our goals and tactics to ensure the work we do aligns with the strategic priorities of the institution, and reviewed our offerings and services to align with the needs of our diverse faculty, staff, and student populations. We strive to provide superior technical support, infrastructure, software, and technical solutions to meet the needs of Empire State University.

Bloome: In a very broad sense, our primary goal is to provide reliable, secure, and accessible technology that ultimately supports our academic mission for students. That includes a lot of things, which is why we have so many teams within ITS—maintaining infrastructure, cybersecurity, supporting digital learning platforms, and on my end, delivering responsive technical support to all users—not just students—which is especially important within an online university.

White: The thing I would like to add is: giving our students, staff, and faculty the confidence and empowerment to utilize the systems that we have. It’s really difficult to learn a new system … so we want users to feel empowered in their day-to-day and give them confidence to use those systems, know that they will work, and that they will help them is part of our mission as well.

What is the hardest part of your job?

Grignon: One significant difficulty in my role is working to balance the competing priorities and technical needs that are requested from ITS. Although we strive to provide the best support possible, we have limited resources that must be managed properly to ensure that the work we do is in the best interest of the institution and in furtherance of the strategic plan.

We continue to evaluate opportunities for ITS to increase operational efficiencies through process automation, defined service offerings, and continual iterative improvements. This includes our management of work in progress, as well as the intake of requests, prioritizing and triaging of issues, requests, and new technical deployments.

Bloome: The hardest part of my job is balancing a high ticket and call volume with the need to be thorough and empathetic. A lot of users … aren’t necessarily tech-savvy, so it can take a lot of patience and clear communication to guide them through the solutions that we have, especially when those issues are complex or time-sensitive.

Timeliness is oftentimes an issue when students are running up against deadlines—I think it’s important to be empathetic in that regard because a lot of times for us at the Service Desk, we are maybe one of three or four ITS people that a student will speak to in the entire time that they’re here. In a lot of ways, it’s us being one of the faces of the university for them.

White: For me, I’d say managing expectations. I’m not student-facing … I only work with staff and not too much of the faculty yet. That’ll start happening, which I’m looking forward to.

We’re used to a world where we can get things very fast … and it’s very hard for us to wait. When people request changes, or want a new process, it’s about managing those expectations for how long that’s going to take to build and what the possibilities are. I love that we dream big here when it comes to systems and what they can do, but sometimes those things aren’t possible—everything has limitations. It’s about really leaning into being solutions-focused and giving users or offices something they can use.

What considerations does ITS need to have given our status as an online university versus at a traditional, in-person campus?

Grignon: There are certainly some considerations that ITS gives in comparison to a traditional in-person campus. As we know, many of our students are taking classes while they work, raise a family, or have other priorities that are outside of their academic studies. We are aware that our students use many of our technology services outside of regular business hours. To help serve those students, we have an IT service desk that is available outside of regular working hours—Monday through Thursday, our service desk is available until 9 p.m. at night, and on Sundays we are available from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. We find that we do have a lot of support requests during these times, especially for our student population who work or have other priorities during the day.

ITS also takes into consideration the academic calendar and course deadlines when we must schedule an outage or maintenance to our systems. This is critical to ensure that we minimize disruptions in our services for faculty, staff, and students.

SUNY Empire also has a very geographically dispersed workforce, and our IT support staff are continually working on improving our ability to provide remote support to our faculty and staff, wherever they are working from.

Bloome: As a largely online university, a lot of things that we consider and prioritize include remote accessibility, platform reliability, and ultimately cybersecurity, speaking of Cybersecurity Month.

Unlike a fully physical campus, students and faculty rely entirely on the digital tools that we provide. So, downtime or access issues can cause really severe disruptions not only to teaching, but to learning. That rolls into needing to provide support for a wide range of devices, which adds complexity to troubleshooting. We recently launched our Chromebook initiative, which added another rung on the ladder of support for us.

White: When we’re evaluating new technologies … we always look at ourselves as an outlier because we don’t need a lot of traditional things that a system may have for in-person students like athletics and dorms—some systems tend to have functions or processes pre-built for things like this.

Being in our position, we always have to consider our students being non-traditional and what that looks like. It’s about how to create a system that works for us. It’s about finding that balance where we still build things that are truly meant for the SUNY Empire student, or SUNY Empire faculty … but making it scalable so that it makes sense and is very easy to support.

What do you wish people understood about the work that you do?

Grignon: IT is not some magic black box. Sometimes people think, ‘We’ll just send it to IT and they’ll handle it,’ and a lot of times we do that. Not many people outside of IT understand what it may take to develop automations or customizations including those in our Self-Service Banner student information system.

There are a lot of things that go into analyzing what has to be done—programming changes, testing the programming, testing the application… But on top of all that building and creating, there is a huge layer of keeping the lights on and supporting what we currently have—the maintenance, time and effort that go into ensuring that our services stay up to date with patching, upgrades, and monitoring all systems.

There are a lot of folks here in ITS, a lot of administrative tasks that have to be done. Believe it or not, even in IT, there is a lot of manual work—we can’t automate everything. I think everybody should spend a few days at the Service Desk and really understand what it means to answer those questions, and understand the breadth of knowledge that our Service Desk staff have.

I started with desktop support, client support, so I lived that life … we have a smallish staff that does that, but the impact to the institution is large, and I’ll never stop selling that.

Bloome: I wish more people understood that at the Service Desk, tech support isn’t just about fixing things. It’s about enabling learning and, in some cases, for faculty and staff, enabling productivity. Behind every resolved ticket is a student that gets to attend class or a professor who is now able to teach. It’s the kind of role that requires consistent learning and a lot of multitasking from us.

White: It goes back to those expectations about what is possible. For me, if I had a dream state, everybody would know how a database is structured, how that data talks to each other, and how it’s configured in a system, because that would inform folks on what is possible or not. When you have an understanding of how data is set up or structured, you have a better understanding of how it lives in a system.

I’d also say that some people look at CRM and tracking student interactions through a lens of ‘Who’s looking this up? Who wants to know about this?’ It’s less about this Big Brother feeling and more about providing centralized, holistic support to students that all faculty and staff can see in one place. If a student ever spoke to somebody here, whether it was 1Stop Student Services, the Office of Financial Aid, Student Accounts, or their student success coordinator, everyone will have this bird’s eye view of what their situation was. It prevents the student from repeating themselves.