Maintenance and Support Section

 

Seventh in the Series ...

Last time, we mentioned the Network Services Section and its scope of services. This time we would like to introduce the Maintenance and Support Section, another functional unit under System and Network. We hope that this series helps our readers to gain better insight into our work.

Maintenance and Support Section

Objective and Scope of Service

The Maintenance and Support Section (MS) is one of the units of Computer Shop. It is also a self-financing operation, which means that its operation cost has to be fully covered from services rendered. It aims at providing quality hardware, software, and network services on a subscription or per-call basis. Profits derived from the services, if any, will be used to improve services or to reduce charges.

Organization

The organizational structure of the Maintenance and Support Section can be summarized in the chart below :

Under the supervision of the Computer Officer, MS Section is divided into three groups : the hardware group, the software group, and the network group. The Computer Officer, assisted by a Senior Technician, will coordinate his staff with CSC and other departments to provide quality services at reasonable prices.

Services Provided

The hardware team of the MS Section is responsible for the installation, repair, and relocation of Sun workstations, VAXstations, PCs, Macintoshes, and their peripherals. The software team installs and customizes software and provides front line support services for over hundreds of software installed on PC, host computers, and servers. The network team, as its name implied, looks after a diversity of network-related matters. Services offered include cabling, installation, repair, trouble-shooting, and relocation for routers, bridges, terminal servers, file servers, printer servers and network cards.

In addition to providing regular hardware, software and network services, the MS Section also arranges trade-ins among departments. The trade-in units can be redeployed from one department to another which has proved to save the University a lot of money.

Interaction with Others

The MS Section works closely with all other CSC sections and users in other departments. Without their support and feedback, it cannot function effectively or even survive.

The MS Section deals with a variety of user problems everyday. It shares valuable information and experience with other CSC sections in improving user services and introducing new services that best fit the users' needs. For instance, this section provides feedback to the Academic Services section in designing users' courses/training and in publishing various tips or articles on solving common users' problems.

Present Difficulties

The MS Section in many ways operates like any ordinary shop. Being bounded by the many University rules which in some ways undermined its competitiveness, and to cope with the increasing demand from departments for more services have created a major difficulty for this Section in maintaining low operating costs. As many software need to be upgraded or installed on a regular basis, configuring these software to run on the many different brands of hardware or resolving incompatibilities among hardware or among hardware and software can be very tedious and time consuming. Furthermore, the service is provided without additional cost which no other service company can possibly supply. In fact, even with these added value services, the MS Section's maintenance charge is still comparatively lower than other service companies who basically provide only hardware repair services. The existing support level substantially increases the operating costs in the long run which makes the planning of manpower difficult.

Most departments, with or without their own maintenance crew, view the Shop as the last resort to solve their problems. They should not expect the Section to provide same level of support through per-call service as it contradicts the Section's policy of giving first priority to service calls from its maintenance subscribers. Moreover, as their machines are not maintained by the MS Section, sometimes the Section reluctantly has to turn down their per-call requests due to lack of schematics, lack of manpower, lack of the necessary spare parts, or for liability reasons, etc.. These generates clashes between these departments and the Section which may not be easily resolved.

Challenges Ahead

Departments will undoubtedly continue to expect the MS Section to provide more services than other service companies while at the same time to maintain competitive prices. The Section has to resolve the following challenges in the long run:

1. The MS Section has to deal with a great variety of computer products and the incompatibility problems among them. It would be harder and harder for this Section to provide satisfactory result while at the same time, keeping charges low.
2. Currently, many value added services are provided with no extra cost. The Section is now facing the dilemma of maintaining the same level of services with higher maintenance fees versus lower maintenance charges with less services.
3. When the number of subscribers decreases, the Section has to figure out a way of balancing its budget while keeping the same level of quality services.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk