A year and a half ago, the Information Technologies and Services Division rolled out a good idea – a project to provide the Lab’s budget analysts with a one-stop shop for maintaining current project IDs for recharge service accounts (e.g., IMAP email). The only downside of the effort was the name – the "single project ID database." To simplify the effort even more, ITSD has rechristened the system with an easier-to-remember name, SAM, for the Service Account Management (SAM) system.

While the name may have changed, the original purpose has not: The goal is to get service providers out of the business of finding and correcting service account problems when an invalid project ID gets into the system. Previously, each correction required a series of calls to the same very busy budget analysts. SAM makes it possible to make the change once (and by the person who knows best) and have it reflected for all the appropriate participating services.

“The only thing we need now is more services included in the system,” said Charlie Verboom of the Computing Infrastructure Support Department. “At least that is what we are hearing from our customers.”

One of the longer-term projects is to work with Telephone Services to figure out how to include phone data in the system, as it is the number one priority of ITSD customers. In addition, the SAM database is viewed as a future source of service account information for the Termination Notification System (TNS), which is the Lab’s new system for managing computer service accounts for departing employees.

Last month, a new system debuted for automatically generating and distributing reports of invalid project IDs, which are then emailed out to the appropriate budget analysts on the first Monday of each month.

Any Lab staff member can use the system to see what services he or she is using, while analysts can see and manage everyone in an organizational work group.

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