Single Points of Contact - SPOCs Overview

Welcome, or hello again, Single Points of Contact! 

First and foremost: The Oregon E-Government Service Desk recognizes that the knowledge and skills of a Single Point of Contact (SPOC) are not always immediately present, but grow over time with the help of explanations and instruction by the service desk Production Support Team.  As a SPOC, please feel free to ask any question and submit any perceived issue and the Oregon E-Government Service Desk will recognize and act on opportunities to teach and expand the SPOC's knowledge when the circumstance presents.

Each service, site and/or application associated with the Oregon E-Government Program must have one person who is the primary contact.  A service, site or application might be described as:

• A website
• A form or set of forms
• An internal or public facing application
• A behind the scenes job or automated process
• Other public or internal services and/or processes that are provided or administered by the Oregon E-Government Program.  This article is specifically geared toward those services/applications provided and/or administered by Tyler Oregon (formerly NIC Oregon) in partnership with the Oregon E-Government Program.

The terms service, application, process and site for the purpose of this article are synonymous and will be referred to as 'service' for the rest of the article.

That primary contact person is the Single Point of Contact or SPOC. This person fills several roles for the service(s) they are associated with:

• Primary source of help and information for the staff and or public users of the service
• Service manager (not to be confused with the Oregon E-Government Service Desk Manager)
• Official voice of the service

A list of these contacts can be found on the Oregon E-Government SPOC list.

Primary source of help and information

Primary source of help

The Single Point of Contact should be equipped to be the first tier support for both public users and program staff users of the service. Some services are quite simple and others are more complex.  The skill set and knowledge required of the SPOC will vary accordingly. It is highly suggested that the SPOC be intimately familiar with:

1. The public facing interface of the service and the business needs it fulfills for the agency in order to provide support to any public users that may require assistance.
2. All of the operations that are carried out by program staff and the expected outcomes of those operations in order to provide first tier assistance to those users.
3. All physical touchpoints in the service
4. All end results or outputs of the service

Equipped with such knowledge, the SPOC will be an invaluable asset to the service team and be able to differentiate between educational opportunities for the team and bugs or issues with the service requiring the engagement of the Oregon E-Government Service Desk.

The primary requester of assistance at the Oregon E-Government Service Desk

While the Oregon E-Government Service Desk is not in the habit of refusing assistance to any program member that needs it, requests related to service issues should, in most cases, be submitted to the service desk by the Single Point of Contact.  Requests such as assistance with expired account passwords will always be addressed regardless of the source and are welcome of the individual staff users.  Requests for assistance with the use of or processes related to service goals and outcomes should be fielded and addressed by the SPOC whenever possible and passed to the service desk when the issue exceeds the SPOCs role or knowledge in the service.

Receiver and disseminator of information

The Single Point of Contact must keep their teams informed.  Messages and announcements from various sources in the Oregon E-Government Program are regularly sent to the SPOC's email address regarding maintenance windows and system issues as well as updates and new features. This messaging should be read and considered by the SPOC and shared with the appropriate teams in a timely manner.

Service or product manager

Permissions

The Single Point of Contact makes decisions regarding who has permissions and to what extent for the service. In services like SharePoint authoring the SPOC effects changes in permissions, in others like TPE (E-Commerce) the SPOC requests those changes at the Oregon E-Government Service Desk and there is a process that must be followed in each of those cases.

Decisions about the service

The Single Point of Contact will be the approver if not the requestor of most any change to a service.  Changes requiring SPOC approval may be related to public facing attributes, business logic, navigation, data handling, etc.  Very few changes can be made by the Tyler Oregon team without SPOC approval.  In some cases changes to services will require a formal change request process that involves several members from the program team as well as more engagement from the Tyler Oregon team.  In those cases the request often grows beyond the scope of a normal ticket and is managed by the project management team.

Manages the service team and their requests for assistance

SPOCs are in charge of the process their team should use to obtain assistance.  If the SPOC desires that a specific process be involved with their team requesting assistance from the service desk, that SPOC needs to make it known to the team and expect the team to follow the process.  The service desk team is not in a position of enforcing agency policy.  If certain approvals, communication channels or informing steps are to be taken prior to or in conjunction with requesting assistance from the service desk, it is the responsibility of the agency service team to meet those expectations.  The service desk has no such expectations aside from what has been mentioned about SPOCs approving permissions changes and service changes. If individuals other than the SPOC need to be informed or are in a position of approval, the team member that submits the request should include those kinds of specifics in the request. The service desk has no mechanism and no responsibility for reminding or enforcing any internal agency policy concerning these matters.

Specifics for SPOCs

Each of these articles details the SPOCs job for the services involved.

- SharePoint Site Collection SPOC

- E-Commerce TPE SPOC

-Changes to and for SPOCs

There are many variables for SPOCs and duties applicable to custom applications.  This article sums it up pretty well, but each might have very different responsibilities than the other.  That being the case, SPOCs for custom applications will be individually addressed in light of the application they are associated with at the time of the production release of the application and ongoing from then on as needed.

updated: 1/11/2023 Shawn Amsberry - Service Desk Manager