Fermilab welcomes Brian McKittrick to the Service Desk

New Service Desk group leader Brian McKittrick

When servers are crashing, error lights are flashing and phones are ringing off their hooks, the Service Desk needs a person with a level head to manage it all.

Brian McKittrick, who joined the Computing Division in mid-August, is that person. As the Service Desk's group leader, he will oversee the Service Desk area, addressing user issues and responding to server outages. He replaces Eileen Berman, who will be working more closely with the experiments in the Computing Division.

"The people here are outstanding," said McKittrick of his new colleagues. "I'm looking forward to making the Service Desk visible as an integral part of the Computing Division's services."

A Naperville native, McKittrick has worked for the past 10 years as senior manager in incident management at OfficeMax. This incident response experience, as well as his personal qualities, stood out to Jack Schmidt, head of the Central Services & Infrastructure Department in the Computing Division.

"One of the things we like about Brian is that he is calm," Schmidt said. "He also seems to be very good at getting to the root of the problem and has already had very good ideas on how to improve the Service Desk for customers."

McKittrick's first goal is to work with Service Desk employees to provide best-in-class service and monitor progress along the way. Over the next year, he plans to continue to grow the Service Desk's role as the central hub for technical support and requests.

"I hope to provide the know-how and tools for incident response and integrate these practices into the daily structure of the Service Desk," he said.

"We're trying to understand what it is people need to do their job, whether they're IT staff members or physicists," he added.

McKittrick, who has been on the job for just under a month, is eager to get started and get to know Fermilab's employees and users.

"Don't be afraid to come by and say hi," he said.

-- Sara Reardon

Ladies of the lake

PPD's Barb Kristen submitted this photo of a close-up view of American lotuses.

Science needs a 'better dialogue with public'

From BBC News, Sept. 13, 2010

The scientific community should have a more grown up dialogue with the public, according to former UK Science Minister Lord Sainsbury.

He said that distrust of scientific ideas was not due to a failure by the public to understand the issues.

Instead, it was because they felt they were being forced to accept changes they had not been consulted over and seemed to offer them no benefit.

Lord Sainsbury is to speak at the British Science Association festival.

The festival runs from the Sept. 14-19 at Aston University in Birmingham, UK and Lord Sainsbury will talk in his capacity as president of the British Science Association.

He will refute suggestions that people in Britain are anti-science.

But according to Lord Sainsbury, there is concern that the pace of current scientific advance is too fast for government to keep up with through effective oversight and regulation.

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