PA extract:
Paul Clayton, a senior IT consultant at PA Consulting Group, says the current working population "has not really grown up with PCs - some office employees don't know one end of a PC from the other."
Full article:
If you've got a problem, fix it yourself.
That has become one of the emerging trends in IT service management as companies worldwide realise they can get employees to take the self-help route to happiness with their hardware or appreciation of their "apps."
Vendors in the IT helpdesk sector report growing interest over the past two years in self-help technologies for employees. These are usually part of wider service management suites, but are incorporated as a page or link on the company's intranet or employee portal.
If employees are getting used to using intranets for checking their pay, booking holidays, and other administrative tasks, why not have them find answers, too, to simple IT problems such as resetting a password, the thinking goes.
But the rationale seems to be less about new-fangled concepts of employee empowerment than good old-fashioned economics.
"Users always feel more confident if they are talking to somebody about an IT problem," says Lindsay Miller, group director for management information systems at LogicaCMG, the IT services company. "But it's very expensive to have every question answered by a helpdesk agent."
Statistics from Gartner, widely quoted in the helpdesk industry, put the average cost of having an employee deal with an IT problem themselves at $1.50-$2, compared with $19 for the average cost of a call to the helpdesk.
Esteban Kolsky, research director at Gartner, concedes it is hard to define an average helpdesk call, and questions whether a password reset query would cost this much to fix, but most observers broadly accept these figures. "The industry is trying to push people down the self-help route, because it can be 15-20 per cent of the cost of answering a call," says Howard Kendall, founder director of the Help Desk Institute. "That's a considerable saving."
Most intranet self-help systems begin with FAQs (frequently asked questions), and as at British Airways progress to fault reporting and tracking. At Trinity Mirror, the UK newspaper group, heavy users of the service desk were identified and encouraged to use an FAQ self-service tool from FrontRange. They were expected to use it for half their IT problems, says David Fazakerley, UK service desk manager, but in fact it is accounting for 80 per cent of their queries.
To be successful, FAQs and similar systems rely on knowledge, in the form of an up-to-date, searchable database, and these are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
For example, Transversal, a Cambridge-based software company, has developed a self-service and helpdesk solution called Metafaq that uses artificial intelligence to answer employees' IT questions. Users of Metafaq, which include the equities technology division of JP Morgan, type in questions in their own words, via a company website or intranet, and each question has to be posed only once for an answer to be made available to other employees. Only the questions that cannot be answered from the existing database are routed through to an agent on the helpdesk, who can add the answer to the knowledge base.
Reporting faults online can also be an advantage for employees, says Russell Flower, director of managed services at Synstar, the IT services company. "Employees can type in what they want to describe the problem, which is faster, and they don't have to wait in a queue. The query is time-stamped from the point when they submit it."
So far, self-help systems are being used for the "low-hanging fruit," says Michele Hudnall, senior research analyst at Meta Group - tasks such as password resets, how-to questions, tracking the status of request, checking information about outages.
Mr Kolsky at Gartner says password reset queries can account for 30 per cent of calls to a helpdesk - Monday mornings can be brutal for helpdesk agents, he says. But trouble-shooting a password problem can be very simple, he notes - unlike a problem such as "the network isn't working."
A further attraction of self-help IT for enterprises is that it can leverage the investments they have made in their intranets or portals, notes Mr Miller at LogicaCMG. "There is no difference between asking a human resources question online or submitting a question about a broken PC," he says. "It makes sense."
Mr Flower adds: "If you have already got an intranet, [self-help IT problem-solving] is a great function to add, because you get more use out of the intranet."
Even so, online self-help has a long way to go. "There's not a high enough adoption," says Ms Hudnall. "It takes buy-in from the lines of business. Enterprises may be worried about costs, but they are not pushing it into the business environment yet." Cultural issues, and the natural desire for human intervention to fix a problem, may be an issue here.
Paul Clayton, a senior IT consultant at PA Consulting Group, says the current working population "has not really grown up with PCs - some office employees don't know one end of a PC from the other."
In 10 years' time, as more people join the workforce who have been used to PCs from childhood, this will be less of an issue, he says.
There are also alternatives to self-help - notably outsourcing, which might offer a cheaper and quicker route to relieving pressure on internal helpdesks.
Also, many legacy outsourcing contracts are not set up to incorporate self-service, notes Steve Carter, global director of helpdesk services at Computer Sciences Corporation.
Nevertheless, Mr Kendall thinks that, over time, the use of online self-help can only grow because of the financial benefits: "Long term, you will see 75 per cent of IT problems handled this way," he says.
