Over the summer, DoIT completely restructured and reorganized, but many are unclear about what these changes mean for Creighton students.

Some are afraid they will no longer have a resource to consult with technological issues, while others are becoming frustrated with the new appointment-only policy

instated by DoIT.

“The fact is, DoIT as people have been used to it for the past six years [at Creighton] no longer exists in the same capacity,” said John Curtin, Arts & Sciences senior and

former DoIT employee. “In the past three years that I worked there, we

fixed antivirus, software, hardware and gaming console problems, and

we interfaced with the student population on a daily basis. In the current model, however, DoIT has been reduced to dealing with Creighton-specific issues only.”

In fact, Creighton’s DoIT now rarely works directly on student computers. The main functions of the department today include working on issues associated with

Blueline, CUMail and CU WiFi.

And while the DoIT student desk will still answer technology-related questions for drop-ins, most services now require an appointment in advance.

Brian Young, vice president of IT for Creighton, provided a statement on DoIT’s website for students concerning the recent changes.

“DoIT’s responsibilities to the university include providing network phone/data and storage functions, applications, security and client support services,” he said. “Continued campus growth enables new opportunities to enhance our IT infrastructure and security strategies.”

These changes, however, do not mean that all the past services provided by DoIT are no longer available to Creighton students. On the contrary, Creighton recently

contracted with ARN Networks, a local IT consulting company, to provide hardware and software services to students. While these will cost students more money than they

have in the past years, the quality of service will dramatically increase with ARN’s presence at Creighton.

Virus removal, software upgrading and hardware replacements are just a few of the services offered by ARN’s student employees, all of whom formerly worked for DoIT,

including Curtin. If an issue comes up that is beyond the capabilities of the student workers, there are several ARN stores located throughout Omaha that will also provide assistance. Students who own computers not purchased through Creighton

are also able to utilize the services offered by ARN.

Another benefit of the new system is the speed of service provided by ARN. In the past, DoIT would get backed up while trying to handle all student-technology related issues, sometimes pushing the waiting period for services up to two or three weeks. With ARN this time period has been greatly reduced.

“When we go through the requests now, we have a specific procedure and a script that we run, and we can usually finish within one or two business days,” Curtin said.

J.D. Rummel, director of Client Relations for DoIT, said the change was to reduce the cost of providing such services to Creighton students. In the past, IT services were provided by several different representatives around campus, often leading to redundancy and wasteful spending. Creighton is merging all of these areas together under one vice president of IT in order to make one unified system for providing assistance to all its students.

“The goal is to try and unify IT wherever possible to reduce waste, particularly foolish redundancy and spending in an economy such as this,” Rummel said. “We are trying to make one organization that is aware of all things that need to be addressed. None of [the other IT areas] are being eradicated, but simply merged.”

DoIT can still be found in the lower level of Reinert, although it now shares a space with ARN’s student workers. ARN’s services at Creighton are provided for a fee, but

students receive a 25 percent discount off the normal rate.

DoIT will still be available for student questions concerning Creighton-specific issues, although appointments are required for any hands-on work done by the DoIT

staff.

“I’ve been with Creighton for 20 years, and this has been the busiest and most complicated summer I can remember,” Rummel said. “We know there has been a lot of confusion about what is going on in the DoIT office, and we are asking everyone to bear with us as we work through this.”