Jason Cross, who has worked for ITS for two decades, has been named as the new leader of the ITS Managed Desktop Services team. Managed Desktop Services (MDS) provides IT support to 14 campus departments.
“Jason was selected to manage the MDS team from a very competitive pool of applicants and clearly stood out as a top candidate to everyone involved,” said David Eckert, Director of Managed IT Services. “We ultimately chose Jason for our manager because he has a wealth of IT support experience right here at UNC-Chapel Hill and has been doing some fantastic customer engagement work with the Service Management Engagement Team over the past few years. We’re really glad to have Jason lead the MDS team and work with all the campus units that MDS supports.”
Cross replaces Dave Scott, who joined ITS from Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools in 2022 before retiring earlier this year.
Goal is to be ‘best on campus at what they do’
MDS provides IT support to faculty, staff and administrators at UNC-Chapel Hill. The group supplies “fixers” for technical support as well as consultative services, with a focus on security and reliability.
Cross said he was excited to lead the team of seven IT professionals, who are divided into two sub-teams, the Enterprise Deployment Team (EDT) and the Desktop Support Team (DST).
“The goal is for MDS to be the best on campus at what they do,” Cross said. “My team has expressed their desire to learn, whether to add to or expand upon their current skill sets. I believe that fostering a team culture that encourages taking advantage of learning opportunities will help us achieve this aspirational goal.”
About Jason Cross
Title: Manager, ITS Managed Desktop Services
Education: Bachelor’s degree in psychology from UNC-Chapel Hill
Native of: Lexington, NC
Family: Marrying his fiancé, Zack, in August. They live in Durham with their two cats and a dog, Booker, who is the 2024 spokespet for Durham Animal Protection Society.
Outside of work: Loves visiting local breweries and co*cktail bars, reading sci-fi/fantasy novels, and keeping up with everything Eurovision. A true Carolina fan who favors basketball but keeps up with football, soccer, field hockey and baseball. “Go Heels!” he emphasized.
Valuable experience
In his 20 years at ITS, Cross has amassed a wealth of technical expertise and skills he brings to the MDS manager position.
He started his career at UNC as a student employee, where he learned the basics of system administration while working on his bachelor’s in psychology. After graduating, he joined the ITS Service Desk as a contractor and later as a permanent employee. He’s worked as a tech support specialist, an operations specialist and most recently as an insights and customer experience specialist for the ServiceNow Engagement Team.
In his previous roles, Cross gained valuable experience in tech support, data analysis, dashboard design, process improvement and customer engagement. He also developed a network of contacts and collaborators across campus.
Cross said his “years in a tech support role has given me a solid background in the various systems and applications” used on campus and that his “personal touch of engaging campus customers” will serve him well in the new role.
“My years with the Engagement Team let me connect with the campus community in new ways, as well as being the trusted contact person for campus groups asking questions about ServiceNow,” he said.
“I’m good at finding the proverbial squeaky wheel,” Cross said. “I then try to come up with possible solutions to get it and keep it greased, such as a process improvement that can be changed to make life easier for the IT community.”
Perfect fit
While Cross brings decades of skills to the role, this is his first managerial position. “As a first-time manager, my first goal for myself is to learn how to be a good one,” Cross said. “I am developing a network of current managers around campus I can reach out to; I am also very fortunate to have David Eckert as a director who can teach me everything he knows while encouraging me to develop my own style.”
“I have spent a long time with two paths before me — taking on a management role or seeing where my reporting journey would take me,” Cross said. “While I’ve wanted to become a manager in general, the MDS manager role felt like the perfect fit for me and was one I could not pass up.”
