Service Desk

To order or inquire about this service, please contact the NIH IT Service Desk.

Service Hours: Normal hours of operation:6:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., Monday – Friday (Eastern Time)Limited after hours support for emergencies:6:00 p.m. – 12:00 midnight on weekdays8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. on weekends and holidays

NIH Service Desk site

Service Ticket System

The NIH Service Desk is the single point of contact for customers requesting IT services and support. As the level one provider of IT support, the NIH Service Desk resolves or escalates requests to its support partners throughout the NIH. It also serves as the primary point of communication for the status of pending requests, service outages, and maintenance activities within the IT environment.

The Aspect System Administration provides a secure, centrally-managed, 24/7 call management system for the NIH Service Desk and some other IT support help desks at NIH. The service includes inbound call management, call routing, remote telephony using a desktop or laptop computer and conventional phone, and access to a reports database allowing customers to generate their own custom reports.

Continuity Assurance Program (CAP) is a service that focuses on IT problem prevention, monitoring, and response. CAP provides a 24x7 system monitoring service to proactively assess problems before the customers report them. CAP maintains system and contact information to coordinate necessary IT responses, and to prevent the recurrence of problems.

Customer Benefits

The NIH Service Desk provides centralized IT support and reusable IT support procedures. The internal Knowledge Management Systems provide a repository of known errors that can be used in problem diagnosis and resolution.

Central management of hardware, software and licenses provides for reduced cost via economies of scale; central report server allows customers to generate their own reports based upon a wide range of fields and parameters; switch is in a secure and managed physical environment.

CAP ensures that NIH customers are informed of service affecting issues.

Customer Market

This service is available to all NIH customers and to other customers outside of NIH.

Frequently Asked Questions

Service Desk

Q: Who primarily uses the NIH IT Service Desk services?

A: The NIH IT Service Desk focuses on providing the best quality support to the internal NIH staff. In doing so, however, it often receives requests from non-NIH users who may use the same NIH Computer services.

Q: What is the best way to contact the NIH IT Service Desk in the case of an emergency?

A: It is recommended to contact us by telephone if you have an emergency. Online service requests are the preferred method of contact for low priority, routine requests for service.

Aspect (Call Center Management)

Q: What is the Aspect ACD?

A: The Aspect switch is a CIT-managed Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) system used by the NIH IT Service Desk, the Electronic Records Administration (eRA) help desk, the Clinical Research Information System (CRIS) help desk, among other NIH customers, to manage inbound call queues.

Q: Who can use Aspect ACD?

A: The ACD service is geared towards NIH IT support organizations with business models similar to that of the NIH IT Service Desk. This approach allows us to leverage economies of scale in providing these call center technologies to customers. For non-IT support, or other business models, there are alternative options available.

Q: Is any special hardware or software required to use the service?

A: A networked, windows-based PC and a telephone are about all you need. Software that runs on your PC links the switch to your local desktop telephone, allowing you to perform all of your call management functions through the Windows interface. The service works with VPN and home telephones as well, allowing for a fully virtual call center environment.

CAP

Q: What is considered a “problem”?

A: A problem in IT is something that causes multiple incidents that affect a NIH employees ability to use technology as expected to do their normal work. Such problems can be an application being offline, a network outage, or a virus outbreak.

Q: Where can I see the alerts that CAP provides?

A: The CAP distributes these alerts to the proper technical audience depending on the type of event via a mechanism called “Hot News”. However, a public listing of alerts that potentially affect NIH Computer users as a whole is posted on the NIH IT Service Desk website under the “Hot News” banner.

Q: If I identify a problem, how do I notify CAP?

A: Anyone can report an IT problem to CAP by contacting the NIH IT Service Desk. The NIH IT Service Desk and CAP are in constant contact and collaborate on a minute by minute basis.

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