Once scorned, the helpdesk has improved and should be IT's showroom
The television sitcom The IT Crowd summed up technology helpdesks for millions of office workers. Techies Roy and Moss took their hands-off approach to problem-solving to extreme lengths, building a machine that automatically answered users' calls. The pre-recorded advice was always the same: 'Turn the PC off and back on again'.
For far too many business IT users, this is far from comedy. An 'efficient' helpdesk is one with permanently busy phone lines, where the staff are rude, or their advice is so unhelpful that their long-suffering colleagues have to resort to their own, home-brewed solutions if they want to do any productive work.
From the perspective of the IT department, businesses' growing dependence on IT, and the increasing complexity of systems, point to rising support costs. Changing working patterns, such as more remote or mobile working, and the trend for running critical business processes over open networks such as the Internet have increased workloads.
"One reason the helpdesk is often inefficient is because IT has become a lot more complex," says Graham Ridgway, chief executive of Touchpaper, a helpdesk tools vendor. If support requests start to spiral out of control, helpdesks can find themselves in a vicious circle of declining efficiency.
"If your approach is unordered, it becomes more difficult - if you send someone out to fix something they will be mobbed by users," he cautions.
It seems users are often their own worst enemies, preferring to flag down the nearest IT person rather than arrange support through the helpdesk or the company intranet. The result is an inefficient and expensive operation and frustrated users.
According to Mike Stops, global service centre development manager at Pilkington, the glass manufacturer, one of the greatest obstacles to improving helpdesk efficiency was failure to log all IT support jobs.
Without proper records, the IT support team cannot pass requests to the right experts, spot signs that might give early warning of systems problems, or undertake root cause analysis when things do go wrong.
"The big problem was for our local IT people in the manufacturing plants," he explains. "If only 25 support calls a month are logged in Touchpaper [the helpdesk management system], I have to take that person away. Either there is not enough work to justify that post, or [users] are not abiding by policy and logging their support requests."
Centralising support queries enables Pilkington to operate far more efficiently than if all IT issues were solved locally.
The company has 12,000 employees, supported by an information services organisation of 580 staff. About 100 of those work in the support service centres. "We have consolidated 50 service centres into five, and using a single instance of a support tool enables us to have a global view," says Mr Stops.
The company has a target of resolving 90 per cent of support calls within its service level agreements, which range from four to 16 business hours. "The volume of calls through the service centre has increased sharply. That doesn't mean that more things are going wrong, but that more things are being reported," he says.
Pilkington's experiences echo those of respondents to a survey carried out by Richmond Systems. The research found that ad hoc or unlogged requests plagued IT helpdesks, with staff spending up to a third of their working hours travelling between jobs.
Avoiding this requires IT helpdesks to make greater use of tools such as case logging software and knowledge bases in order to become less reactive, argues Chip Gliedman, a vice-president at Forrester, the researcher.
"Helpdesks were a group of people who sat around waiting for the phone to ring. It was a backwater of IT, an entry-level position that people tried to get out of as quickly as possible," he says.
"But over the past decade we've seen the helpdesk become the face of IT, or its customer service arm. Along the way came the realisation that the ad hoc model of dealing with issues as they arose was insufficient."
As a result, businesses have created better processes and invested in tools for handling support queries, as well as worked to integrate the helpdesk more closely into IT service delivery.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), developed originally by the UK government, has also helped businesses make their support operations more efficient, Mr Gliedman points out.
Creating a more efficient helpdesk depends heavily on better monitoring and management, allowing departments to move away from a break and fix approach. "It is a question of analysing the problems that occur, identifying those that are common and taking proactive steps to stop them happening in the future," he says.
Doing so will doubtless make helpdesks more effective. But CIOs are not helped in this quest by the absence of any solid, cross-industry benchmarks for technical support functions. Organisations such as Pilkington have carried out their own benchmarking by comparing performance across sites, but this is unlikely to be an option for smaller companies.
Relying on standard measurements can be fraught with difficulties. A common measure of helpdesk efficiency is the number of problems fixed on first contact with the helpdesk. Installing common tools such as automatic password resetting removes the "easy" calls from the helpdesk queue, with a higher percentage of the remaining calls needing a referral to second-level support.
This can have the unintended consequence of making helpdesks appear less, not more efficient.
Technology does offer a partial answer, suggests Derek Lonsdale, a Boston-based expert in IT support issues at PA Consulting. But the cost of implementing tools such as remote desktop management means that businesses often opt to outsource support, rather than upgrade in-house capabilities.
"The total cost of ownership of a helpdesk is high, and there are lots of big [outsourced] players who can do it, and do it well," he says. The main exception is where organisations use a lot of bespoke or heavily-customised software that would be difficult for an outsourcer to support.
Whether CIOs choose to outsource support, or invest more in in-house support, it helps to quantify the productivity losses that can come from IT downtime.
If business software is available for more hours of the day, staff will be more productive; if support is quick and efficient, the time saved goes back in to the business, rather than being wasted in a helpdesk queue.
Cutting the number of repeated support incidents has to be the goal for an efficient helpdesk. "If an ERP [enterprise resource planning] system fails for 20 minutes every Monday, you have a productivity loss that you can quantify," says Mr Lonsdale. "You can calculate that and build a business case for support."
A more efficient helpdesk can even improve companies' customer service. Meineke, a US automotive service group, found that a small investment of just seven software licences has brought a huge improvement in satisfaction levels among staff at its branches, which operate on a franchise basis.
Software from vendor LogMeIn allows Meineke's IT department to carry out remote diagnostics and repairs on users' point of sale PCs, allowing franchise staff to focus on their day-to-day tasks. "Before, we had much longer support calls and these were troublesome because we couldn't see the users' screens," recalls Lisa Olin, head of IT. LogMeIn claims that its remote support tools double the effectiveness of helpdesk staff, numbers which Meineke's experiences appear to support.
"It was time-intensive for us, and for the franchisee. Now, it requires much less user time - they can spend that time selling to customers," says Ms Olin. Franchisees do not have to use Meineke's software, but those that do see remote support as a useful value-added feature, she suggests.
It is a point that resonates with those responsible for developing helpdesk tools, too. Better and more efficient IT support, suggests Touchpaper's Mr Ridgway, is likely to lead both to more motivated IT staff and a better appreciation of the role of IT in the business.
"One job of the CIO is to educate the organisation so it becomes more IT savvy. Then, when it comes to budget time, you have a better chance of fighting your corner," he says. "The service desk is IT's showroom."
