Digital Services Summer Showcase
Great to see you, sorry if we missed you!
If you were able to attend, thank you for coming along to the summer Digital Services Showcase; an event designed to help the team share what we’re doing, celebrate successes and get to know each other.
There will be regular showcases throughout the year but, in the meantime, you can revisit or discover what was covered below.
Service Desk Progress and Stats
The first presentation from Amanda Marlor looked at the progress made on the Digital Technologies Service Desk and stats for the year so far.
Amanda shared information about how the use of the Service Desk has changed over the past academic year, as well as statistics that show the growing use of the Service Desk, and how the team’s processes are evolving to make the customer experience of using the Service Desk as positive as possible.
Audio & Visual Implementations
The second presentation from Caleb Connors looks at the implementation and improvements to audio & visual equipment throughout the University, in teaching and common spaces.
Connor presented the recent and on-going Easter and Summer installs, including a move to AVIXA Standards, the 44 University spaces that have received recent updates, and an upcycling initiative to ensure minimum waste during the hardware refresh.
Easter and summer installs include:
- HA Desks/Lecterns
- Huddly AI cameras
- Sennheiser TCs – beamforming microphones
- New non-reflective, wide-angle view, low-energy LED panels in University common areas.
Digital Services Branding
Chris Green (Chief Digital Officer) and Leigh Nicholson (Head of UX) discussed the importance of consistent branding of the Digital Services department and shared progress on the refinement of the department’s brand guidelines.
To enhance access to Digital Services for students and staff, we are implementing brand guidelines and reinforcing the use of correct branding and departmental naming across all services. This initiative aims to eliminate any confusion about where to seek help for specific issues.
The branding guidelines were shown as work-in-progress and further information about their use and how to find them will be communicated internally shortly.
DICE Policy Chatbot Progress
Steve Green demonstrated progress from the DICE team, looking at a policy chatbot which helps users find relevant information specific to their query, from a range of existing policy documents.
Steve shared information about how staff in Digital Services and the University Compliance team in Secretariat can contribute by testing the deployment of the beta version of the tool.
The tool contains growing number of organisation policies; Digital Technologies, Finance, PPC and wider organisation policies, with more being added over the next few weeks. It also contains all of the data hosted on the Digital Technologies web pages.
Testing will be available to staff members in the above departments during the end of July and the start of August (2024), with any issues being directed to the DICE team.
Team Kudos
Steve Green finished the formal part of the showcase with an introduction of the Digital Services team kudos board, highlighting exceptional team contributions over the past few months.
We received 16 messages from team colleagues highlighting the excellent contributions from Digital Services team members.
A small portion of the kudos board messages can be found below.
- Chris Townhill and Bryony Wills
Old code rewritten to enable better processes and easier fault resolution, and offering up future opportunities to manage identities in a better way - UX team – Monika Jain | Developers – Dale McKeown, Billy Street-Rose, Jake Harrington
Great collaboration and enthusiasm, despite some last minute requirements (UX)
Working really well together to deliver what looks like a fantastic tool for students and staff to experience – desktop designs and academic timetable also now complete (Dev) - Networks teams
Compute and storage teams have been completing a significant amount of improvements and remedial works out of hours, improving services and mitigating impact on users
Read all 16 kudos messages using the link below.
What’s to come?
We will be running showcases regularly throughout the year, with the next one planned for the end of October 2024. If you want to show off a bit and tell the wider team what you’ve been up to, then please contact JoWatson@lincoln.ac.uk.
