Manager of Academic Technology

About the role

The Manager of Academic Technology leads the Whitman Service Desk in providing hands-on support and technology services to faculty, students, and staff.

Responsibilities

• Oversees a service desk handling a volume of approximately 5,000 tickets per year through a combination of walk-up, telephone, and email requests.
• Serves as the school’s technology liaison, learning new tools quickly, training and coaching faculty and staff in their use, and connecting users to the appropriate specialist resources within Whitman IT and central ITS (system administration, networking, classroom support, web development, automation, and the central learning-management-system team).
• Faculty & Staff Technology Liaison, Training & Enablement.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for faculty and staff adopting and using technology tools. Rapidly learn new applications and platforms well enough to coach and train end users, in person, through written guides, and through recorded video and deliver workshops as needs arise.
• Act as the connective layer between users and specialist resources, routing instructional-design, learning-management configuration, classroom, development, and automation needs to the correct team.
• Technology Procurement & Asset Tracking.
• Own each faculty and staff hardware and software request from intake through delivery: assess the need, recommend the appropriate standardized or configure-to-order solution, place and track the order, and record the asset accurately in the service/asset system.
• Follow each purchase across its full lifecycle, request, recommendation, order, arrival, assignment, and record, maintaining the standard device baseline and documenting configure-to-order exceptions.
• Coordinate purchasing-process steps with the administrative assistant and escalate vendor and warranty issues. Partner with the data analyst on aggregate asset reporting.
• Service Analytics, Self-Service & Continuous Improvement.
• Monitor the ticketing system for trends to identify recurring or high-impact issues and devise preventative solutions that reduce service desk volume.
• Build and maintain self-service resources such as a knowledge base and online scheduling/booking.
• Partner with the data analyst for deeper reporting and metrics.
• Lead or contribute to service-desk and unit technology initiatives.

Qualifications

• BA/BS required, MA/MS preferred. In lieu of degree, 5+ years of relevant experience.
• Proven experience managing or working on a technology help desk or service desk.
• Demonstrated supervisory experience, including recruiting, training, scheduling, delegating, and managing the performance of professional and/or student staff.
• Demonstrated ability to learn new technologies quickly and to train and coach others in their use; this role values the ability to learn and teach over deep expertise in any single platform.
• Experience supporting faculty and/or students with a learning management system (e.g., Blackboard) and other instructional and classroom technologies at a support and training level.
• Strong customer-service orientation and sound judgment to resolve issues at the desk or escalate appropriately to specialist teams.
• Excellent time-management skills with the ability to appropriately prioritize multiple competing requests.
• Excellent written, oral, interpersonal, and presentation skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with people at varying levels of technical literacy.
• Proven ability to succeed in a collaborative, team-based environment as an enthusiastic and flexible team member.