Founded in 1967, George Brown College (GBC) is one of Canada’s largest and most diversified colleges, serving more than 22,000 full-time students and 38,000 continuing-education registrants. With 157 full-time programs and 1,600 continuing education courses offered at either its two main campuses (Casa Loma and St. James) or 10 training facilities, GBC enables its students to graduate with a diploma, degree or certificate, depending on the program they select.
For George Brown College of Applied Arts and Technology, meeting the requirements of its ever-growing faculty and staff, who in turn support its student body, is no small undertaking.
GBC had established a help desk service through a third-party provider to better support its faculty and staff, which members could contact when experiencing challenges with their desktops, notebooks, software applications, and printers. However, the feedback the GBC IT team was receiving from staff and faculty members about the service was less than favorable.
Processes were considered cumbersome, the English-language proficiency of the help desk representatives was an issue, and faculty and staff members would often need to reiterate their issue to more than one representative—a major inconvenience.
As a result, GBC decided to issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) and invited Buchanan Technologies to submit its bid on a help desk solution for its faculty and staff.
After meeting with GBC to understand the current situation, review its requirements and determine what it really wanted in a solution, the Buchanan team went about crafting a proposal that was focused on ensuring the faculty and staff members received the type of support they required so that they could spend more time helping their students.
The Buchanan proposal for GBC included a number of key elements, including:
Buchanan’s improved help-desk solution was noticed immediately. In fact, one staff member stated that “I have found the Buchanan help desk to be instrumental in helping GBC staff by asking questions in regards to troubleshooting. He is the first person to ask me in-depth questions so that he can help GBC staff calling in with various phone and/or voice mail issues.”
It was this type of feedback that GBC’s Chief Information Officer was expecting when he and his team awarded the help desk contract to Buchanan. He said, “As one of Canada’s largest colleges, we have a large number of faculty and staff we need to support. Thus, we needed to deliver a solution that would provide them with the support they required and be cost-effective at the same time.”
Buchanan architected a help desk solution that enables the university to achieve both these important objectives. Responsive support, process improvements, regular reporting, cost efficiencies, and a Canadian-based solution are the hallmarks of the customer’s solution and the key reasons GBC entered into a partnership with Buchanan.
Learn more about the specific IT solutions deployed & their outcomes
