I’m considering adding a role that will have an element of “Administrative Assistant” for our IT department and was wondering if any of you have a role like that.
Right now I am the IT Director and I have 2 help desk staff and 2 ChMS staff reporting to me, but I find myself doing things like submitting requisitions, working with vendors to get quotes, scheduling meetings, etc.
I’m considering creating a role that will be half Admin and half ChMS, in hopes of filling in a few gaps, doing some phone-based triage, and handling the purchasing side of IT so I can focus on directing IT. The only issue I have is I’m not sure what the admin of an IT department should have access to, and what type of tasks I can securely allow them to take over.
Do any of you have an Admin for your department? How do you handle that?
This role is often called a “Services Coordinator” and they would usually only have as much access as required to solve quick issues that happen frequently. Password resets and whatnot. If you let them get stuck in the weeds on more involved things it’ll impact their other duties and doesn’t differentiate them from any other technician (which can also be an HR problem).
I’m looking less for someone who will actually have access to make changes, and more for someone who will manage communication between staff and IT, be in charge of the purchasing process (requisitions, budget tracking, etc.), managing inventory, answering phones, making calls on my behalf, etc. The triage portion would be simply to help direct requests to the correct person on our team.
I know some admins on campus have full mailbox access to the person they are an admin for, but I have a feeling that would not be ideal for an IT role given the number of systems my email address could be used for password resets. I’m also not sure that would free up any of my time, although it may help to keep me from forgetting to respond to something someone is waiting on a response for.