The Division of Customer Support is the central provider of IT support at NIH. At the heart of the division is the NIH Help Desk providing technical support to the NIH community via the World Wide Web, phone and email. The Help Desk receives over a thousand requests for service every business day, and where issues can not be resolved in-house, they are assigned to support staff in each of NIH’s Institutes and Centers. Support cases are assigned and resolved using NIH’s central ticketing system, supported by the Support Technologies Group who also provide the help desk’s phone switch, the CIT Knowledge Base and the CIT customer support web presence.
Augmenting these real-time support efforts is the CIT Training Program offering a variety of training classes in computer topics relevant to researchers and administrators at NIH. Courses cover a wide range of IT topics reaching all the way from the breadth of the enterprise down to the end user’s desktop.
At the desktop level, the Desktop Support Section offers recommendations, best practices and a forum on desktop support to the NIH community, while providing CIT with such support internally. Additionally, volume discounted software, hardware and services for the desktop and enterprise are made available to NIH by the Enterprise Licensing Group via the Information Systems Designated Procurement (iSDP).
Helping to wrap all these services into a bundle, DCS provides the Relationship Manager Program. The RMs, as they are affectionately known, are the main interface between CIT and the NIH ICs, both representing CIT services and advocating for the customer.
And, finally, DCS supports IT security via the CIT ISSO function, ensuring that CIT continues to set the example for NIH in this important area.
