College implements IT monitoring software

New tools gives management clearer view of technology needs

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has become an early adopter of management software designed to monitor the efficiency of IT services.

The college has improved IT delivery levels by overhauling its support procedures, and wanted to monitor IT performance and increase its flexibility.

IT services helpdesk manager Evgeny Bukhalenkov, who led testing of the IT business management suite from vendor Touchpaper, says the college is building on existing work to raise IT service levels for 10,000 students and staff.

‘We want to move towards providing the college decision-makers with better information about IT performance,’ he said.

Students, academic and research staff and administrative personnel have different computing needs that require specialist IT resources, creating complicated IT management and maintenance, he says.

The organisation also has a complex IT infrastructure to monitor, which includes Microsoft Active Directory, and software applications and databases running on Oracle and Linux.

‘It can be difficult to provide an at-a-glance view to find out how different platforms are performing,’ said Bukhalenkov.

‘By analysing service levels, we can find out which pieces of hardware are more reliable or what the most common set of needs is.’

The IT department has started using the software components to define and design the college’s IT service processes to monitor performance levels more effectively.

The LSE will then use the suite’s process engine to build automated IT monitoring and management procedures using Microsoft .Net development tools.

‘Even standard processes, such as the remote installation of software, can be configured differently for different users,’ said Bukhalenkov.