Written By: Joseph Sattout, General Manager, Excite IT
Many global and multi-national corporations have more than one Help Desk. Some have more than 10 Help Desks. And a handful of companies have even been known to have more than 50 Help Desks worldwide! Why so many? Well, most of these companies will tell you that they never planned to have so many service desks; it just happened. Really? How does it “just happen”? Why???
The 90s can be seen as a time of astronomical growth in the Technology industry. The early 2000s was a time of cutting back (often deeply) and making do with as little as possible in terms of resources and personnel. Now that the worst of the economic recession is behind us, Technology can take the best of each of these worlds and make a better one.
That means Consolidation.
It’s not cutting back like during the recession, nor giving in to unrealistic luxury like the economic boom. It’s taking the luxury of having enough resources, the lessons of doing without, and building a better IT service desk with those parts and pieces. Consolidation might be a global enterprise conglomerating their IT operations, or a national company merging departments, or a smaller organisation bringing in the bits of IT that lurk within individual departments.
Reduce Your Overall Headcount
Arguably the highest benefit to a Help Desk / Contact centre consolidation, is the headcount savings from having a more efficient team. In addition to reducing training efforts and eliminating the need to manually pull data together, service desk consolidation also reduces workload by enabling integrated self-service capabilities such as catalog, request, and knowledge management in alignment with a standardised ITSM framework.
Better User Experience
Users like it simple, so keep it that way.
Experiencing IT issues are painful enough for users to experience, with a consolidated Help Desk function and cohesive contact pathway, you are in effect establishing a Single Point Of Contact (SPOC) for all users to report issues to – which immediately avoids the confusion of who to contact for what.
This Ultimately improves your users experience, and could potentially see the C-SAT scoring trending upwards. Great News!
Compliant with Compliance!
Demonstrating the effectiveness of controls — for example, incident and change management processes, is a common requirement. Specifically for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), there is a demand requirement for a clear audit trail. A consolidated Help Desk that adopts a standard uniform approach and system of record that also enables a comprehensive and integrated end-to-end approach to configuration and change management will keep those auditors at bay and keep your CIO happy.
Improved Reporting
Ask yourself – What is my overall service level right now? This question will have different meanings for different organisations. However, just imagine that you are a Service Director responsible for a large council. You have seven Help Desks providing a range of support including Tax, Compliance, Planning, etc. Answering the question may require various data exports and the manipulation of disparate data to arrive at something that resembles an answer. If the question is repeated a week later, you may find yourself using a different method for arriving at an answer, therefore losing any reference to the previous report…. Not good.
The key is that the more you can consolidate into a single service management platform, the simpler the reporting task becomes: consolidated, open, standardised, available, rapid, segmented, and REAL.