Outsourcing Services at SLU 

Various offices on campus, including Safety and Security, Information Technology and Facilities Operations, outsourced their services for the first time last year. The outsourcing of services on campus changed many operations and came with its own set of challenges and benefits. 

The Help Desk Manager of Information Technology, Randi Jo Buckley, explained the changes in the office after starting to work with a third-party organization in October 2024. “IT has a managed service group that has a Center of Excellence team that they have, and they’re the people who are manning the phone lines for us,” she said. 

This team of eight to 10 workers is located anywhere in the United States and answers phones for about 10 other schools to troubleshoot IT tickets. 

The workers in this team triage the tickets that come through the IT website and email and “see if it’s something that they can handle quickly without having to go to the help desk or one of our other staff members or techs,” according to Buckley. If the tickets cannot be directly solved by this team, they are forwarded to the relevant units on campus, such as Audio Video, Services and Infrastructure teams. Users would immediately receive an email from the Center of Excellence about their ticket status and can still communicate with IT on campus, according to Buckley. This troubleshooting process “frees up the time” for the IT team on campus to work on other things or help with the larger items. 

A student worker at the IT Help Desk talked about the challenges that come with outsourcing. “Since we do not take calls anymore, we have to become more of a technician,” they said. “We were told this was a customer service job in the hiring process, so it just feels dishonest.” 

Director of Student Safety, Jaylen Arroyo ‘27, shared the delays in their operations after the outsourcing of Safety and Security calls. “Whenever I needed to contact someone, I could just pull out my walkie-talkie [to contact] the dispatcher,” Arroyo said. “But since we don’t have a dispatch, I have to go and figure out which officers are going to be patrolling that night and contact those officers through walkie-talkie instead.” Similarly, the operations sometimes take longer since the workers in the third-party organization are not familiar with the area compared to the dispatchers. 

However, Arroyo likes the fact that the office can provide 24/7 service for students thanks to this new system. “I feel like it’s a change that it can cause some miscommunications, but if I had to pick between this or just outright not having a dispatch on for the night, I would choose this every single time,” Arroyo said.