Our Unidesk shared service

I'm pleased to see that UCISA's Executive Secretary has written a blog post about the Unidesk shared service for service management. This was set up by the universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Abertay, who were joined last year by Sheffield Hallam. Unidesk currently provides facilities for incident reporting and handling (i.e. service calls), enhancement request, and for managing change & release. The next development of the service will add a configuration management database.

I am impressed that Peter managed to write his blog post without once mentioning the ITIL framework for service management. From our point of view, the entire aim of the Unidesk project was to provide a comprehensive service for the ITIL set of practices. Peter is more interested in how the shared service was set up and managed.

Unidesk has been a great success for us. It hasn't always been plain sailing behind the scenes, as you would expect with any complex IT installation. Back at the start, the integration with the Shibboleth federated identity took a while to get sorted. It also took us a while to align the release plan across the different institutions. Overall though, the system has been reasonably pleasant and pain-free. If you are in a UK university, do come and join us.

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Distributed Thinking

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