Boyce, Glover and Wagner receive OIT Awards for Excellence

Excellent leadership, team player, unwavering dedication and unmatched customer service — These are the distinctive character traits of the Office of Information Technology’s 2023 Awards for Excellence winners: Damian Boyce, James Glover and David Wagner.  

OIT held on April 19 its annual awards ceremony, which recognizes employees who have excelled in customer service, efficiency and innovation, human relations, outstanding state government service, public service, safety and heroism, and the spirit of North Carolina. 

Five OIT employees were nominated for their extraordinary contributions during 2022 and three were selected for the division’s top award:  

  • Damian Boyce, Technology Support Services
    Nominated in the category Outstanding State Government Service, Boyce, a technology support analyst, has been an asset in the successes of OIT ClassTech. He was recognized for this positive mentorship and inclusive, encouraging attitude. His work and dedication have been instrumental in the success of two new support analysts. Boyce has tuned in to their specific needs and openly shared knowledge to steer them on a positive trajectory with ClassTech. During the pandemic, ClassTech adopted several new technologies to address the need for asynchronous learning. Boyce quickly picked up and understood the new skills needed to support these changes. Among those changes were new tools to allow ClassTech to remotely monitor the status of essential devices in the classrooms, such as the desktop computer, the video conferencing equipment and the Panopto media capture devices. Using these tools, Boyce became an essential resource, detecting many equipment issues by leveraging Zabbix and coordinating with the rest of the support staff to resolve these incidents before significant impact to lectures and faculty could occur.
  • James Glover, Technology Support Services
    Nominated in the category of Customer Service, Glover, a technology support specialist, was recognized for his dedication to his job, his team and the campus community. Glover works with end users to help explain issues with a recognition of the user’s time and its value. He understands that getting end users back to work is critical and does this with an urgency and understanding of what downtime means. Regardless of title, Glover provides that same sense of urgency and exceptional customer service to every user. He is also ready to help his team at the drop of a hat. When requests for assistance or questions come up in team meetings, Glover is often one of the first team members to respond. And as a team lead, he leads by example through his work, his attitude and as appropriate to the university, his ability to teach. In the last year, Glover has volunteered to help the College of Science (COS) for several months, while still assisting the OIT teams. While he helped at COS, he never stopped maintaining knowledge of the changes occurring in the Managed Desktop Support (MDS) team. After coming back to the MDS team, he has maintained a consistent relationship with the COS team to make sure they have the information and training required to continue rising as a newly rebuilt organization.
  • David Wagner, Technology Support Services
    Nominated in the category of Customer Service, Wagner, an IT integration and solutions professional, was recognized for his work on the NC State Help Desk. In what was easily one of the most difficult years on record for the help desk, Wagner was instrumental in ensuring that the group continued to provide expert support for users across and beyond campus. When the help desk began in 2022, there was a constant concern about how the staff was going to keep its time-to-answer and queue-response time down due to the multitude of projects and events planned for the year; these are some of the most important metrics for customer satisfaction. In no small part due to Wagner, that turned out to be a non-issue. An example of his contribution can be found in the Alumni Account project that began in 2022. Out of the estimated 6,500 incidents generated by this project (as of February 2023), he resolved nearly one-fourth or more than 1,800 of those questions. By answering so many of these alumni questions quickly and efficiently, Wagner ensured that the help desk was able to maintain relatively normal operations, even through a massive spike of incoming tickets. In the period between Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2022, there were approximately 36,700 tickets resolved by the help desk. Of these, Wagner resolved an impressive 9,500 tickets, which is nearly one-fourth of all tickets resolved in total for the year. This does not include the countless other incidents he has helped other help desk staff resolve and the incidents he has preempted by documenting much needed knowledge for the alumni transfer project and other IT processes. 

Each of the three winners received a plaque, $250 and eight hours of paid leave; they also will vie for the University’s Awards for Excellence on Wednesday, June 14 at 2 p.m. in the James B. Hunt Jr. Library Auditorium. Following the event, a reception will be held in Duke Energy Hall in the library. 

Other OIT employees who were nominated at the division level included Ryan Gallagher of Security and Compliance and Ed Rogers, formerly of Communication Technologies.