The higher education institution that I work has this Information Technology (IT) Services unit. The unit aims to provide a high quality networking, computing and support service to help students, staff and faculty inside the campus. The IT services unit is tasked to make the best use of information technology.

There are various services that are supported inside the campus like Internet, email service, web hosting, file sharing, application development, multi-media services, IT training services, and other software and hardware related support. There’s this constant focus on security matters on the various services. Lately, there’s even this implementation of user authentication for every user who would like to use the Internet and email service.

The IT Services unit has an in-house Information Systems section which is composed of several people in-charged of the maintenance, support, and development of all applications. Aside from that there systems integration and data analysis work. This is the section where I belong and we’ve had various web based applications and client server applications which are mostly Oracle based. We have Oracle and MSSQL as our main working database.

The institute offers some back to school laptop program where laptop could be availed at lower price. This year the chosen brand is Dell Vostro 3100. Helpdesk support is available for all the student, staff, and faculty. There are training services that on occasional instance being delivered short course participants.

This year, the institute if considering outsourcing of IT services as an alternative to the in-house services. This will allow the institute to focus on the core competencies that it has. Getting IT services from a local provided within the vicinity more practical in some ways. If for example the area of business is in New York then new york it services would be the closest option to be considered. Outsourcing will open up more flexible services to be able to cope up with the changing global needs of the educational institutions.