Role of the Departmental IT Contact (DITC)
Areas of responsibility
There are two main areas of responsibility which DITCs are asked to request on behalf of their departments, and a third only in certain (limited) circumstances.
- Act as an authorised requestor for new IT accounts and mobile phones
- Help us communicate news regarding our services more effectively
- Help us manage the shared X: drive storage used by your department
Act as an authorised requestor
Some requests for IT services need to be authorised before we will action them.
As a Departmental IT Contact you will be able to request these services directly from us, on behalf of your department. This will be through a self service web interface to allow the requests to be made as easily as possible and to remove or reduce the paper trail.
DITCs can:
- Request to create, extend or expire a staff IT account
- Request to create, extend or expire an associate IT account
- Request to order a mobile phone or other mobile device
- We may also ask for your help in dealing with issues around these services (e.g. communicating in respect of changes to accounts within a department).
See how to use the Self Service portal to request new IT accounts and order mobile phones.
Communicate news regarding our services more effectively
From time to time, we need to communicate work taking place that may affect IT services such upgrades, maintenance work or disruption.
As a departmental IT contact we will send you:
- Non-technical and easily understood information about disruption affecting our services
- Information about changes and improvements to our services
This will allow you to decide how to best communicate them within your department to people who may be affected by or who may find the information useful.
This will not replace the existing mechanisms that IT Services uses to communicate through our website. However, you will be helping us to send more targeted and relevant communications out to your department’s staff and students.
As a DITC you will be the only person receiving this information, so your knowledge of the people in your department, their needs and interests will be very important to decide who you forward this information on to.
Help us manage the shared departmental X: drive storage used by your department
Many departments use the shared departmental X: drive. These often need to be changed/updated as staff leave and join. The role of the DITC in this process will differ depending on if your department is fully supported by IT Services or not.
If you are in a fully supported department then as a Departmental IT contact, you will act as an administrative point of contact for us regarding changes to your department's X drive such as requesting and approving changes to access for users in your department.
If your department is not fully supported by ITS then you will already have local arrangements for this activity in place which we would not propose to alter.
Skills and time required
The key skills required to undertake the DITC role are:
- A good understanding of the activities going on in the department that you represent and who does them
- Knowledge about people joining and leaving the department on a permanent or temporary basis
- Ability to use basic IT systems such as email and websites
The time required to fulfill this role will depend on the size of the department that you represent and the amount of staff change that takes place within the department. However, we do not anticipate this to be more than a half to one day per month at most.
