I interact a lot with the IT staff in the statistics department. So here is a page of my advice when working with StatIT. I hope they will agree with the advice given here.

Use stat-tech@iastate

If you have a problem you want solved, email stat-tech@iastate.edu. This will create a ticket, which will get emailed back to you, and the ticket will get forwarded to the IT staff in statistics as well as their boss. As far as I’m concerned (and nobody really cares about my opinion in this matter) if there isn’t a ticket, then there isn’t a problem.

When creating a ticket provide as much information as you can. In particular, you should try to create a minimum working example (MWE) to illustrate the problem(s) you are having. This should include information like what operating system you are using, what program you are using, what command you entered or what icon you clicked, etc. In addition, you should do as much as you can to narrow down the exact source of the problem.

There are two main reasons for creating a MWE. The first is that you can often determine the source of your problem and fix it without ever needing to bother anybody else. The second is that IT now has a very specific problem to work on and thus their time is used efficiently.

In addition to a MWE, you should describe the variety of variations on this MWE that you tried, e.g. did you try it on other computers, on other OSes, etc. This will help isolate the problem as much as possible.

When providing more information to the ticket or responding to an IT response, you can simply reply to the email contains the ticket making sure to leave the subject line intact. When responding, it is best to delete the contents of the response, i.e. the quoted email history, as this material will always remain with the ticket and therefore will be duplicated if you leave it. Of course, if you want to respond point-by-point (which shouldn’t be necessary because you should have provided a MWE) then feel free to keep those pieces quoted and add your response.

Use https://cytech.its.iastate.edu

An alternative to using email, you can log on to https://cytech.its.iastate.edu and ‘Report an Incident’ or view your ‘Active Requests’ or ‘Closed Requests’. You can also use this site to add information to a request.

Use statit@iastate

Generally you should not be using this email address. But if you just want to ask a quick question that really isn’t an “incident” and you don’t want to generate a ticket, then you could use this address. As far as I’m aware, this gets forwarded to the IT staff in the department.

Use researchit@iastate

When using the cluster (at least this is where I experience this), some of the requests should go to Research IT rather than StatIT. In particular, anything dealing with modules is a ResearchIT and requests should be sent to them. When in doubt, send the ticket to StatIT. If it should go to Research IT, Stat IT will either let you know or initiate a ticket on your behalf with Research IT.