Tarleton State University’s Stephenville campus Information Technology department handles anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 calls a month while keeping the campus and Tarleton’s satellite campuses running smoothly and up-to-date with the current technology demand.

Stephen Wilson, Manager of User Support Services at Information Technology Services, gave some insight to the current workings of the department and also some additional advice to students about the technological opportunities that Tarleton has to offer.

Students enrolled in the Spring 2014 semester all experienced a merge of passwords and usernames for their MyGateway and Blackboard accounts, creating a single password and username for both services to simplify the student’s online experience.

“It was our observation that students just had too many usernames and passwords to remember,” Wilson said. “So it was our objective to go in the right direction and get that whittled down.”

This change caused a flood of calls to the Help Desk from students trying to figure out the new system and access their accounts for class, keeping the IT workers on their toes.

“Now there was some growing pain with that obviously, but it was worth it. At least we hope the students think it was worth it,” Wilson said. “And we have felt the feedback we’ve received from that has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Wilson, in response to the large volume of calls, has offered good graces to students.

“The president has said that one of our core values at this university is civility, and having been on the phone with hundreds and hundreds of our students, I will say that they are incredibly patient, civil, polite, and it has been a delight to talk with these folks and my other coworkers have repeated that,” Wilson said. “They were all gracious and they knew that the outcome ultimately was going to be a positive thing for everyone.”

With the increase in computing power, advance in technology, and demand from the public to bring those advances and services to the campus, the IT department has their hands full, but according to Wilson, they like a challenge. He said the biggest hurdle for the department lately is the Wi-Fi on campus.

“We’re trying to get Wi-Fi that’s not only stronger everywhere but can handle the growing number of devices that connect to it,” Wilson said. “Individual students are now coming to the university with multiple devices that they want to connect to Wi-Fi all the time, and now the faculty and staff are showing up with their personal items and it’s connected to Wi-Fi. We can have 7,000 high school FFA students show up on buses, and it starts getting pretty scary when you think about how much demand there is for those services and how the expectation is that they’re instantaneous and easy and universally available. So that’s a challenge, and we love a challenge.”

With the demand to keep the university up to speed and running smoothly comes a lot of work behind the scenes from the department faculty, staff,  student employees and administration. Finding solutions to these challenges is what the IT department does best.

“The changes in technology are related to portable computing. That’s a new challenge too, because the university has to find a way to refresh all this technology and afford it,” Wilson said. “We’re growing and expanding and so now we have to provide more computing devices. So every time you add a piece of infrastructure, you have to think about what’s the expense of not just buying it but supporting it over time, keeping it updated, refreshing it later, putting software on it, delivering the work services to it, and providing support for it.”

Tarleton’s Stephenville campus also reaches out and sends it’s own IT student workers to it’s growing satellite campuses that do not have an IT department themselves, like Waco.

“We have a Tarleton presence there, but there’s no IT staff there,” Wilson said. “So I think we continue to feel spread thin, but the good news is that we have very supportive administration that when we have said we need more student workers or we need more staff they have been responsive.

With the growth of the campus, the IT department is also expanding.

“We continue to grow our student workforce and when we open up the library commons here, I have an opportunity to expand further and have more student employees at that satellite location to assist students,” Wilson said.

According to Wilson, there are no typical days in the offices of the Help Desk, but to him, that’s what makes the experience so interesting. They deal with something new every day, and find pride and enjoyment in helping the campus patrons connect with their technology, whatever it is.

“ That’s what makes this interesting, is that we are just here to let our customers ask us what they need and from day to day,” Wilson said. “The things that are consistent from day to day though are that we serve faculty and staff in support of their office technologies and in some cases their personal technologies. We may have a new cell phone come in the door and they want to get their Tarleton email set up on it, so we are going to help them with that. We want people to have access to their stuff, and if their technology is an obstacle then we want to resolve that. We take anywhere from 2,500 as a low average to about 5,000 calls [for password adjustments and web help alone] as a high in a month.”

The department currently employees 15 student workers who assist the campus with technology support.

“They are the only way I can keep the doors open. They are the gears in the machine,” Wilson said. “It is always hard to lose one when they graduate but it’s also fun to see them go on to take good jobs in the technical, healthcare industry or aerospace fields. We’ve had just very exciting things that these students have gone off to do, and in some instances we’re kind of jealous. That’s why I’ve been doing this for 14 years and I love it; I can’t say enough good things about the student employees.”

The Help Desk does more than troubleshoot issues. They are also happy to listen to ideas on how to improve the student and work experience through technology.

“I would hope that students would feel like [they] can reach out to us, not just when something isn’t working, but to say, ‘Hey this would make my life better as a student.’ I would love to hear that,” Wilson said.

Students are able to give their feedback and ideas to the IT department by emailing the Help Desk at [email protected] or emailing Wilson personally at [email protected].