I Finally Know What I'm Doing... Sort of

Post #3
Date: 6/17
Activities: Learning the tools used in IT
Technical Skills: MIDAS ticketing, Computer Manager, AVAYA Phone Dialer

Reflection: So here I was. Day 3 and I am finally exposed to what I'm going to be doing for the next couple of weeks. The Help Desk (HD), or the Employee Service Desk (ESD), was the part of IT that I was in. Our customers are not other companies or vendors, but rather what are referred to as "internal" customers, SAS employees. If a SAS employee had a problem with their computer or mostly anything technology related, they would contact us. The ESD is split into three main branches: Helpdesk Personal Computer support (HPC), Helpdesk Unix and Exchange support (HUX), and Helpdesk Front Line (HFL). They each have their own specialty and focus on solving specific issues. For example, the HPC team handles hardware issues, IE issues, and virtual machines, while HUX fixes problems with Outlook, Macs, and Conferencing (such as a system called WebEx). Even though Alex and I are technically part of the HFL team, we don't have the technical ability to be able to really help solve problems. Instead, we help facilitate the ticket process and exchange of communication so that teams get the proper problems and be able to proceed with helping resolve the problem.

There are multiple ways of contacting the help desk. The most common method is through SAS's ticketing system, named MIDAS. People can open tickets about anything, from server issues to asking for a pen and journal (to which we kindly ask them to ask their manager for help). These tickets, when they are first opened, are automatically routed to our HDO queue, short for Help Desk On-Call, which is the queue Alex and I are part of. We read the description of their problem and decide the next appropriate course of action. If it is something we can solve, such as a password reset, we go ahead and fix the issue and close the ticket out. However, most of the tickets we receive cannot be closed out by ourselves, and must be routed to the appropriate team that handles that kind of ticket according to their specialty. For example, if someone were to complain about their IE crashing all the time, we would route the ticket to HPC and have them take a look at it and do further troubleshooting.

AOIT is amazing in the fact that it exposes us, the students, to so many real world business experiences and really give us the chance to evolve and increase the proficiency of our soft skills, in the classroom and out. With numerous team projects and presentations, speaking in front of other people or communicating effectively within a group has never been easier. These soft skills easily transferred over to my internship here at SAS, having to communicate with numerous people everyday. Because we're just high schoolers, we didn't really have the technical skills needed to really fix any issues that employees might have. So even though it would have been nice to have learned some technical skills prior to the internship, it probably wouldn't have been possible within the scope of a high school curriculum.

The different duties of the Help Desk

They even had signs