Upon hearing that his obituary had mistakenly been published
in the New York Journal, Mark Twain is famously quoted as saying “The reports
of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
The same can be said for the service desk despite the blogs
here and there that are suggesting that factors such as social support,
self-help, bring your own device (BYOD), virtualization, cloud computing and
wide-scale outsourcing are minimizing the service desk’s role.
The reality is that those factors are changing the
service desk role, but not minimizing it. Increasingly organizations are
realizing that the need for support and therefore the service desk’s role must
be considered when making strategic decisions such as BYOD or a move to
virtualization or the cloud. Service desks must, in turn, embrace this more
strategic role and make the transition from reactive to proactive.
One way that service desks can make this transition is to
take a more disciplined approach to Knowledge Management and by pushing that
knowledge to its customers via self-help. Self-help can include not only access
to knowledge bases, downloads, and patches but also facilitated community
forums. Such an approach is not only cost-effective ($6/self-help contact
vs. $22/service desk contact according to HDI), it also
represents a positive response to customers’ increasing tendency to Google or
Tweet first and only then contact the service desk.
Other ways to make the transition to a more strategic,
proactive service desk include a more formalized approach to Problem Management
that not only feeds Knowledge Management (e.g., workarounds and known errors)
but also seeks to eliminate recurring incidents, thus freeing service desk
resources to work on new and more complex incidents. And therein lies an
important point; self-help can only address known issues. The dramatic
technological changes facing the IT industry are resulting in plenty of new
incidents, many of which are complex in nature given peoples’ increasing
tendency to access data, information and knowledge across a wide array of
platforms and technologies. And here’s another important point to keep in mind…
as organizations adopt practices such as virtualization and cloud computing,
connectivity becomes critical and so incidents that stand in the way of that
connectivity are now viewed as major.
This means that service desks must find ways to collapse the
traditional tiered approach to escalation and solve as many incidents as
possible at the first point of contact. This approach has long been known to be
cost-effective for the service provider. An incident that costs $22 to solve at
the service desk, costs $62 at level 2 (e.g., desktop support) and $85
at level 3 (e.g., the application or network teams) according to Metricnet.
It is easier said than done; however, as it requires refining or perhaps even
reengineering the processes that dictate how the service desk interacts with
higher-level resources such as the technical and application management teams.