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Facilities and Campus Services (FCS) serves Cornell through the planning, design, construction, operation, and ongoing maintenance of University facilities.
This General Service Level Expectation (GSLE) covers the general requirements for all FCS-supported facilities used for educational and operational purposes where not otherwise defined in service-specific Service Level Expectations (SLE). It serves as a guideline for terms of service and support and is a meaningful reference point for FCS and its customers when engaging in discussion about level of service.
1. Service Description and Offerings
A customer-facing view of FCS’s services is provided in the Service Catalog. The catalog displays services that can be requested by university students, faculty, staff, and IT professionals.
An internal business view of every FCS service is provided in the Service Portfolio. The portfolio includes services currently offered to university partners as well as services in development and retired services.
2. Support Information
FCS’s operational business hours match the university's office hours: 8 am to 4:30 pm Eastern Time (U.S.), Monday through Friday. Support will only be provided during these operational business hours except as indicated below, however, incidents and service requests may be submitted any time via the Service Catalog.
After-hours support is available for widespread emergencies or for service outages affecting essential services and some critical services. Requests for this kind of after-hours support should be made by phone to the IT Service Desk. Submitting an after-hours incident or request via the Service Catalog or any other method will likely not result in an expedited response from CIT.
All support requests must be submitted through the authorized channels listed above. Only those channels are considered in-scope for official FCS support and service delivery. FCS does not monitor, endorse, or provide support through unsanctioned platforms, including but not limited to text messaging, social media, public discussion forums, or other informal online channels. Peer-to-peer support in these spaces is considered outside the scope of official support services.
See sections 3, Customer Communication, and 15, End User Responsibilities, for more detail on support interactions.
3. Customer Communication
Service outages, disruptions, and scheduled changes that affect customers are communicated via the Facilities and Campus Services website.
Customer communication occurs through several channels, including email and the self-service portal. The channel is determined by the information being distributed:
Support interactions
Customers can view the status of their support requests at any time in the self-service portal. Notifications will typically also be sent to the customer and any additional identified contacts.
Performance degradation or outage
This would be outside of FCS’s Domain. Typically sent through standard communication channels, including the IT@Cornell website and Net-Announce-L e-list. Major incidents are typically also posted to the IT@Cornell website.
Changes to production systems
This would be outside of FCS’s Domain. Typically sent through standard communication channels, including the Net-Announce-L e-list and the Scheduled Service Changes section of the IT Alerts app on IT@Cornell.
Annual metrics
Shared through email to unit customers, FCS leadership, and any other key stakeholders.
4. Support Criticality
Support criticality is an indicator of a service offering's importance to business operations as assessed by functional stakeholders and FCS. Support criticality indicates to support staff the relative importance of that service offering to the university's business operations and establishes the service level targets for time to respond to and time to resolve service requests and incidents. The assigned criticality helps:
- Inform staffing needs
- Shape required technology infrastructure, such as monitoring capability, redundancy, and related
FCS applies these definitions (determined by service management, the business relationship manager, and the IT directors) for routine operating situations for the university. During a business continuity event or highly important annual business cycles, services may be temporarily assigned an elevated criticality.
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Support Criticalities
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Name
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Definition
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Essential
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Primarily capabilities required to provide the university's most essential business operations and ensure the life and safety of the Cornell community, including faculty, staff, students, animals, research subjects, hospital patients, etc. Essential service offerings should be highly available and staffed with 24x7 support. An architecture review should ensure that all key technologies used to deliver the service also match the criticality of the service.
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Critical
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Primarily capabilities that enable or support the university's teaching, research, outreach and administrative needs.
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Important
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Primarily capabilities that enhance the university's teaching, research, outreach, and administrative needs.
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Best Level of Effort
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Support provided at the discretion of a service support team, in situations where there is no contractual agreement with FCS to provide support, but in the spirit of goodwill, it is in the best interest of both parties to provide limited-scope assistance.
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Unsanctioned
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Any support request that is not sanctioned by the university. This may be due to safety, security, policy, legal, ethical, or other concerns.
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5. Service and Data Availability
Services are generally available at a minimum during operational business hours, but this varies widely according to the customer's use cases. Services that require high availability (around-the-clock and redundant) have that requirement noted in the service-specific SLE.
All services require some amount of routine or occasional maintenance. FCS makes every reasonable effort to constrain this activity and any resulting downtime to a maintenance window. (See section 9, Technical Change and Maintenance Windows.) For services delivered by FCS in partnership with vendors or other third parties, availability is dependent on our contractual agreements with those partners.
6. Data Integrity and Quality
Data integrity and data quality are a joint responsibility and require cooperative effort between FCS, CIT, customers and vendors. FCS will pursue data issues to their source and remediate them to the extent possible. CIT's responsibility is to ensure consistency between source data and target data; corrections to erroneous sources are the customer's responsibility.
7. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Disaster recovery (DR) plans are required for technologies and services that enable services with a support criticality of Essential or Critical. Teams that support these services must receive DR training and review, update, and test their DR plans annually.
FCS also participates in larger efforts to ensure business continuity in the event that there is a university emergency that requires additional facility related services and support. These larger efforts are coordinated and managed by the university's Emergency Support Function (ESF).
8. Service Level Targets
Service level targets (SLTs) for time to respond to and time to resolve support requests and incidents are reported quarterly and annually by the service management program. FCS’s goal is to meet service level targets 95% of the time or better. This percentage is based on standard tickets and does not apply to university-wide disaster or emergency situations when facilities services are needed beyond the regularly agreed upon service levels. See the Service Level Management (SLM) Process Document for details about reporting and definitions of terms related to SLTs.
- Prioritization: FCS uses a Priority Matrix as a guideline for prioritizing and responding to incidents, major incidents, and problems. See the Priority Matrix to see how priority is calculated based on impact and urgency.
- Response: For the purpose of SLA calculation, "response" is an indicator of when a support ticket has been picked up and assigned to a resource. It is not the same as notifying a customer. Customer notification may or may not happen around the same time depending on the situation and time of day.
- Resolution: For the purpose of SLA calculation "resolution" is an indicator that, in the case of an incident, a solution deemed satisfactory by FCS support staff has been identified, and in the case of a service request, fulfillment of the request has taken place. It does not necessarily indicate acceptance of the solution or fulfillment by the customer.
For an accessible version of the tables below, see Service Level Targets Appendix. Except where listed as 24x7, all times are listed in CIT operational business hours (minutes, hours, or days) as listed in section 2.
Incident and Service Request Targets
9. Technical Changes and Maintenance Windows
Changes to production systems include but are not limited to activities such as software vulnerability or bug-fix patching, regular upgrades, and modifications to system function or configuration. These changes are requested, documented, and approved via CIT's Change Enablement process. They are generally performed at a time that minimizes user impact to productivity and maximizes available recovery time in the case of a failure or issue. When possible, this is done during CIT's standard maintenance window, but service-specific SLEs may outline different maintenance windows based on service utilization times. Communication takes place as indicated in section 3, Customer Communication.
CIT's standard maintenance window:
- Saturday and Sunday between 6am and 12 noon Eastern Time (U.S.)
- Monday through Friday outside the operational business hours of 8am to 4:30pm Eastern Time (U.S.)
10. Policy & Compliance
10.1 University Policy
Changes to security policies or university requirements could result in service alteration. All Cornell community members are data stewards and share a joint responsibility in protecting the university’s resources. End users are required to comply with all university IT policies and government regulations, with particular attention to University Policies 5.10 and 4.12.
Cornell equipment and services are provided and intended for university business use. End users may be required to address or participate in resolving security or compliance concerns arising out of misuse of services, equipment, or data. Repeated failure to comply or properly address concerns may lead to removal of access to service, equipment, or data. See University Policy 5.1 Responsible Use of Information Technology Resources.
10.2 CIT Policy
Services in ordered to be delivered and managed by FCS must be officially on-boarded as a service in order to ensure that customer expectations can be met and operational requirements met before offering service to customers. FCS services are required to be part of the standard service management program. Systems that store user data must also be included in the Regulated Data Chart to enable consumers to properly comply with policies 4.12 and 5.10. Refer to service-specific SLEs for any supplemental policies regarding acceptable use and information security risk and compliance.
11. Feedback & Enhancements
11.1 General Feedback
Customer feedback informs FCS’s continual service improvement efforts. End users and business customers may submit an improvement via ticket. Feedback is reviewed and escalated to the appropriate service owner, service delivery manager, business process owner, or other responsible FCS resource.
11.2 After Closure Surveys
A survey is sent to individuals who request support or report incidents to gather feedback around their interaction with FCS and satisfaction with the outcome. Surveys are sent for each incident or service request two days after closure, with a limit of one survey per requestor per week.
11.3 Annual Surveys
Facilities Service Group (FSG) customers are polled annually by the Business Relationship Manager in FY Q4 for satisfaction with FCS’s support. Customers are provided an opportunity for a follow-up conversation. Results are reported to FCS leadership and service delivery managers, as well as to unit customers if requested.
11.4 Enhancement Requests
Service delivery managers and service owners are expected to define a process for prioritizing and managing enhancements to services and support as requested by customers.
12. Service Reporting and Metrics
Service owners and service delivery managers review and act on support metrics monthly throughout the year. Monthly metrics are provided to CIT leadership by email. Distribution of service reporting outside of CIT will be revisited in the future.
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Key Performance Indicators
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Category
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Reported Metric
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SLA
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SLA % overall for FCS
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SLA % by classification*
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SLA % by service and service offerings
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Volume Trending
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Volume of work overall for FCS by fiscal year
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Volume of work by classification*
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Volume of work by service and service offerings
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Backlog
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Backlog Change % overall for FCS
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Backlog Change % by classification
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Backlog Change % by service and classification*
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Feedback Survey
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Customer Satisfaction % overall for FCS
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Customer Satisfaction % by classification
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Customer Satisfaction % by service and service offerings
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* Classifications included in these support metrics are incident and service request only.
13. Training and Documentation
CIT provides, contracts for, and coordinates training for IT services as justified by university need and demand. Training is available via IT@Cornell Training. Courses without scheduled sessions can be requested from IT Training Customized Courses & Administrative Support.
General information, instructions, troubleshooting guidance, knowledge base articles, and self-led training for customer-facing services are typically provided via the FCS Ticket Toolbox Knowledge Base. Service delivery managers are responsible for the accuracy of this information. Customers can suggest updates, additions, or changes by submitting feedback via a Documentation request.
14. FCS Service Roles and Responsibilities
To ensure that services are properly managed with respect to the university's needs and in accordance with the Service Level Expectations, FCS assigns service responsibilities by role as defined within the service management program; see the Program Document for more details. The most commonly leveraged roles in service delivery are:
Service delivery managers, who ensure that
- Customers receive support
- Issues are addressed by support teams
Service owners, functional owners, and Service Steering Committees, who ensure
- The strategic needs of the university continue to be met by the service
- The service is cost effective
- There is a long-term plan to anticipate service needs
15. Customer Service Roles and Responsibilities
15.1 Support Expectations
When contacting FCS to report issues or request service, end users should use an official channel, preferably the Service Catalog. Communication outside of official channels is generally not measured or consistently recorded and therefore is not subject to the targets in section 8.
If FCS needs additional information or confirmation from the end user, support staff will attempt three points of contact using at least two different channels before resolving the ticket for lack of response.
15.2 Security Expectations
Access management to FCS’s service management suite and provided customer applications is important to maintaining access control. See individual SLE documents on how each Service Delivery Manager handles provisioning and de-provisioning. Application owners are encouraged to coordinate periodic access reviews to ensure that access is appropriate.
16. Service Costs and Rates
Service costs are recovered by CIT in one of two ways:
- No Fee: rate is appropriated via the university's Cost Allocation Model (CAM)
Detail about total costs of providing services are managed by service owners and are available to CIT and unit IT partners via the Service Portfolio. Unit IT groups seeking to have CIT assume a support function or provide a new service may incur costs beyond the customer rates referenced above; to begin that process, contact Shari Sprole, CIT Business Relationship Manager.
17. Glossary of Terms
Terms particular to a given service will be included here in the service's SLE. For everything else, see the Comprehensive Service Management Program Glossary.
18. Service-Specific Details
Any details relevant to a given service not covered in the sections above will be included here in the service's SLE.
19. Approval
This document is reviewed once annually. 2025 review began on 12/21/2025 and concluded in the April meeting on 4/18/2023.
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Name
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Role
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Last Review Date
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Rhea Gibson, Bridgette Brady
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IT Liaison and FCS Directors
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Alysia Hillyard
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CIT Service Management Program Manager
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Shari Sprole
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CIT Business Relationship Manager
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