Service desks are just too good for IT to keep for themselves
(2022/02/09)
- Reference: 1644429612
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/02/09/service_desks_are_just_too/
- Source link:
Paid Feature Wouldn’t it be great if joining a new company was like walking into a bar where everybody knew your name, and more importantly, knew exactly what you wanted, or even better, what you needed?
Getting your work laptop would mean simply walking across the office to an IT Help Desk colleague, who will also set you up on the network, before you stop on the way back to your desk to check in with HR who will then use your employee ID to add you to the payroll and ensure your benefits and medical insurance is all in order.
Anytime you needed to book travel, arrange an event, or upgrade your software, the right person would be alerted automagically, ready to help. And, before long, no-one would need to ask you how you like your latte when it’s time for a coffee run.
[1]
The problem is while some microbusinesses and startups might indeed have such a set-up, most large organizations are sprawling, complex beasts, whether they’ve grown organically or through M&A. Specialized departments are spread out, whether within individual office complexes, or across multiple regions. Accessing the “services” that these siloes offer becomes less a journey, more like negotiating a maze.
[2]
[3]
The situation is further complicated by changes over recent years in working patterns that are likely to be permanent. For many workers, the option of fast-forwarding things by walking down a corridor to pick up that laptop or drop off that personal info form, may well be shuttered for good. It is also worth noting that people are not static in their job role. People change. People leave organizations. So not knowing who the right person to go to can be puzzling.
Meanwhile, enlightened organizations are striving to improve the employee experience, with services presented logically and centrally, and purchase or support journeys happening smoothly and seamlessly.
[4]
What’s needed, explains Seyi Verma, Director of Product Marketing (ITSM) at SolarWinds, is a way of exposing services, routing people to them, and automating the workflows that deliver them to the people requesting them.
If that sounds like the sort of service catalogs that IT departments have been offering for years, using platforms like SolarWinds IT Service Desk, you’d be right. And if you thought well, surely that’s too good to keep purely for tech services, you’d be right again.
As Verma explains, a services catalog essentially serves up all the services that are available to an employee, and, in the background, automates the workflows needed to deliver them, “so that the employee, for better or worse, doesn't ever have to leave their desk and go find someone. This is a neat little efficiency gain.”
[5]
A developer might be used to filing a ticket to provision additional storage. And a marketer may often request for an NDA review and approval. Both of these requests can be made using the same platform, but the first ticket goes to IT and the second goes to Legal.
From there, it’s an easy step to envisioning other business or service owners using the same underlying platform to provide access to their services. For example HR could allow employees to set up benefits, or supply key information by simply filing a ticket via a portal, and, Verma explains, “all of that gets rerouted in the background and goes to the right business owner.”
Tickets please
It’s worth remembering that this is firmly in line with the guiding principles of ITIL, which emphasize the creation of value, holistic thinking and collaboration, and automation and optimization, both within the organization and for customers.
Anyone with experience in the corporate world will be aware that there are dedicated software packages and platforms for services like HR or facilities management. The problem is, they are precisely that – dedicated to managing the workflows within a given function – and any given ticket, or issue, or indeed service, could touch multiple departments.
For example, what initially looks like an HR issue – checking benefits – can also touch finance, payroll, and facilities. Likewise, as Verma explains, managing IP and filing a patent could encompass engineers, marketing, IP specialists, and general legal – functions that might have vastly different attitudes when it comes to technology adoption.
But there’s a wider benefit in simply not having to deal with app sprawl, which entails supporting maintaining, and paying for myriad systems and platforms for different departments – and hand crafting the integration between them. This can be time consuming and costly and may even require people dedicated to specially manage the integration
Verma is a case study himself, having joined SolarWinds from a startup. At his previous employer, getting any issue resolved was straightforward – it was a small company, and he “knew everyone.”
On the face of it, SolarWinds, with over 3,200 employees, could have been a very different proposition. The company has grown through multiple acquisitions as well as organically; employees are “geographically distributed and, with Covid everyone is all over the map. There could have been soo many silos. But the onboarding process was very smooth. Anything I had a question with, I would just file a ticket or find an answer for. And it gets routed, and the right person responds to it every time. It was the best experience that I've gotten.”
Experience can of course be subjective. But applying the ITSM approach to service provision in general means organizations can begin objectively defining what a good experience is.
“As an organization or as a service provider, I can set those SLAs that I want my team to start standing behind,” he says. This means more visibility on how the team is doing and more accountability to the rest of the organization. “Those are the kinds of things that employees have started expecting, versus just having it go into a black hole.”
And as systems and workflows become more complicated, there is the danger that individuals can struggle to see the bigger picture. This is something that SolarWinds is tackling with integration of AI into its platform.
The aim is that when an employee is faced with a problem or issue, they are not simply asked to file a ticket. Rather based on the inputs they enter, not only does the organization get visibility that a problem is brewing, but the employee is presented with a solution or a knowledge base article that will help them resolve or at least understand the situation.
Ultimately, this all contributes to maximizing the productivity of employees and their ability to deliver value to customers and the organization. As Verma says, “If your phone or laptop isn’t working, and you need something done, what are you going to do?”
To IT and beyond
So how does an organization get to this state of nirvana? Surprisingly, perhaps, most IT Service Desk rollouts are not “big bang” affairs.
Typically, installations start with the IT department. After all, Verma explains, “It's the IT department that provides the largest range of services and assets to employees.” And this is where features such as automatic discovery of devices and dependencies comes into play.
But once an organization has met an immediate need, the potential for other departments to adopt an (IT) service management approach begins to emerge. “Through word of mouth within the organization, it grows very quickly into other departments.”
Indeed, SolarWinds IT Service Desk has developed in this way in “direct response to customer requests,” according to Verma. The result is a wide-range of pre-defined workflows for non-IT services within Service Desk. “It is the out of box experience that we provide to a lot of these customers with these workflows, or service catalogs already defined. And this goes hand in hand with customizability for your particular use case. You can start small and then naturally make it as complicated as you want.”
Crucially, SolarWinds aims to make the rollout beyond the IT heartland a frictionless process, with organizations able to get up and running quickly, and picking additional services as appropriate, all without additional scripting or coding. “We want to give that zero code experience to people where it's available in our service catalog and ready to go.”
So, implementation times should go from months to days, or weeks. That said, SolarWinds recognizes that many departments will already have platforms in place that they rely on and which may not be easily dispensed with. “One of the things that really separates us”, says Verma, “ is that we have integration into many solutions that could potentially be used by other departments.”
Does this all add up to the sort of organization where everybody knows your name? That might be asking too much. But if you do ever need to change your name, at least you’ll know there’s a predefined workflow to make it happen.
Sponsored by Solarwinds.
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Getting your work laptop would mean simply walking across the office to an IT Help Desk colleague, who will also set you up on the network, before you stop on the way back to your desk to check in with HR who will then use your employee ID to add you to the payroll and ensure your benefits and medical insurance is all in order.
Anytime you needed to book travel, arrange an event, or upgrade your software, the right person would be alerted automagically, ready to help. And, before long, no-one would need to ask you how you like your latte when it’s time for a coffee run.
[1]
The problem is while some microbusinesses and startups might indeed have such a set-up, most large organizations are sprawling, complex beasts, whether they’ve grown organically or through M&A. Specialized departments are spread out, whether within individual office complexes, or across multiple regions. Accessing the “services” that these siloes offer becomes less a journey, more like negotiating a maze.
[2]
[3]
The situation is further complicated by changes over recent years in working patterns that are likely to be permanent. For many workers, the option of fast-forwarding things by walking down a corridor to pick up that laptop or drop off that personal info form, may well be shuttered for good. It is also worth noting that people are not static in their job role. People change. People leave organizations. So not knowing who the right person to go to can be puzzling.
Meanwhile, enlightened organizations are striving to improve the employee experience, with services presented logically and centrally, and purchase or support journeys happening smoothly and seamlessly.
[4]
What’s needed, explains Seyi Verma, Director of Product Marketing (ITSM) at SolarWinds, is a way of exposing services, routing people to them, and automating the workflows that deliver them to the people requesting them.
If that sounds like the sort of service catalogs that IT departments have been offering for years, using platforms like SolarWinds IT Service Desk, you’d be right. And if you thought well, surely that’s too good to keep purely for tech services, you’d be right again.
As Verma explains, a services catalog essentially serves up all the services that are available to an employee, and, in the background, automates the workflows needed to deliver them, “so that the employee, for better or worse, doesn't ever have to leave their desk and go find someone. This is a neat little efficiency gain.”
[5]
A developer might be used to filing a ticket to provision additional storage. And a marketer may often request for an NDA review and approval. Both of these requests can be made using the same platform, but the first ticket goes to IT and the second goes to Legal.
From there, it’s an easy step to envisioning other business or service owners using the same underlying platform to provide access to their services. For example HR could allow employees to set up benefits, or supply key information by simply filing a ticket via a portal, and, Verma explains, “all of that gets rerouted in the background and goes to the right business owner.”
Tickets please
It’s worth remembering that this is firmly in line with the guiding principles of ITIL, which emphasize the creation of value, holistic thinking and collaboration, and automation and optimization, both within the organization and for customers.
Anyone with experience in the corporate world will be aware that there are dedicated software packages and platforms for services like HR or facilities management. The problem is, they are precisely that – dedicated to managing the workflows within a given function – and any given ticket, or issue, or indeed service, could touch multiple departments.
For example, what initially looks like an HR issue – checking benefits – can also touch finance, payroll, and facilities. Likewise, as Verma explains, managing IP and filing a patent could encompass engineers, marketing, IP specialists, and general legal – functions that might have vastly different attitudes when it comes to technology adoption.
But there’s a wider benefit in simply not having to deal with app sprawl, which entails supporting maintaining, and paying for myriad systems and platforms for different departments – and hand crafting the integration between them. This can be time consuming and costly and may even require people dedicated to specially manage the integration
Verma is a case study himself, having joined SolarWinds from a startup. At his previous employer, getting any issue resolved was straightforward – it was a small company, and he “knew everyone.”
On the face of it, SolarWinds, with over 3,200 employees, could have been a very different proposition. The company has grown through multiple acquisitions as well as organically; employees are “geographically distributed and, with Covid everyone is all over the map. There could have been soo many silos. But the onboarding process was very smooth. Anything I had a question with, I would just file a ticket or find an answer for. And it gets routed, and the right person responds to it every time. It was the best experience that I've gotten.”
Experience can of course be subjective. But applying the ITSM approach to service provision in general means organizations can begin objectively defining what a good experience is.
“As an organization or as a service provider, I can set those SLAs that I want my team to start standing behind,” he says. This means more visibility on how the team is doing and more accountability to the rest of the organization. “Those are the kinds of things that employees have started expecting, versus just having it go into a black hole.”
And as systems and workflows become more complicated, there is the danger that individuals can struggle to see the bigger picture. This is something that SolarWinds is tackling with integration of AI into its platform.
The aim is that when an employee is faced with a problem or issue, they are not simply asked to file a ticket. Rather based on the inputs they enter, not only does the organization get visibility that a problem is brewing, but the employee is presented with a solution or a knowledge base article that will help them resolve or at least understand the situation.
Ultimately, this all contributes to maximizing the productivity of employees and their ability to deliver value to customers and the organization. As Verma says, “If your phone or laptop isn’t working, and you need something done, what are you going to do?”
To IT and beyond
So how does an organization get to this state of nirvana? Surprisingly, perhaps, most IT Service Desk rollouts are not “big bang” affairs.
Typically, installations start with the IT department. After all, Verma explains, “It's the IT department that provides the largest range of services and assets to employees.” And this is where features such as automatic discovery of devices and dependencies comes into play.
But once an organization has met an immediate need, the potential for other departments to adopt an (IT) service management approach begins to emerge. “Through word of mouth within the organization, it grows very quickly into other departments.”
Indeed, SolarWinds IT Service Desk has developed in this way in “direct response to customer requests,” according to Verma. The result is a wide-range of pre-defined workflows for non-IT services within Service Desk. “It is the out of box experience that we provide to a lot of these customers with these workflows, or service catalogs already defined. And this goes hand in hand with customizability for your particular use case. You can start small and then naturally make it as complicated as you want.”
Crucially, SolarWinds aims to make the rollout beyond the IT heartland a frictionless process, with organizations able to get up and running quickly, and picking additional services as appropriate, all without additional scripting or coding. “We want to give that zero code experience to people where it's available in our service catalog and ready to go.”
So, implementation times should go from months to days, or weeks. That said, SolarWinds recognizes that many departments will already have platforms in place that they rely on and which may not be easily dispensed with. “One of the things that really separates us”, says Verma, “ is that we have integration into many solutions that could potentially be used by other departments.”
Does this all add up to the sort of organization where everybody knows your name? That might be asking too much. But if you do ever need to change your name, at least you’ll know there’s a predefined workflow to make it happen.
Sponsored by Solarwinds.
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YgRHmiCpfzDI5TQPMJiuDwAAABc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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