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This policy relates to personal data, as defined by the Data Protection Act 1998, held on the Service Desk call logging system.

The Service Desk runs a ticketing system that holds details of each call made to the Service Desk, and the progress made in dealing with it. This includes any email messages sent to or from the recognised Service Desk email addresses. This policy applies to all tickets within the Service Desk system.

The information is used for the following purposes.

  • To track the progress of each call and to ensure that it is dealt with appropriately and in a timely manner.
  • To produce statistical reports for management purposes, such as for the Annual Report of the UIS. Such statistics do not include personal data, but require personal data to be held, e.g. to determine the number of different customers during one year, to identify customers in order to conduct regular surveys for the Information Technology Syndicate.
  • A small minority of call records are useful for dealing with subsequent problems, especially where a member of UIS staff has sent a detailed solution by email, which can then be re-used for a different call. In such cases any personal data from the original call is removed before the data is re-used.

A call record is marked as deleted when it has not been significantly changed for 15 working days. From that date, the data is kept for 18 months and then deleted. Such data may then still exist on dump tapes, but these tapes are re-cycled frequently.

The information is shared, as necessary, with members of UIS staff who deal with Service Desk. It may be shared with departmental or College computing staff where it is appropriate that a problem be so dealt with. Other people may share some of the data where this is clearly appropriate, e.g. where the customer has already involved a third party. Access to the Service Desk database itself is restricted to staff of the UIS.

If it becomes apparent that inaccurate information is held, this data can be corrected by contacting the Service Desk. Data held in some fields forms a timestamped log of information as recorded - such data cannot be considered to inaccurate by virtue of its content, but corrections as to fact can be appended to this log.

Last updated: October 2011