The Broken IT Help Desk
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Recently I have been working on writing a set of practices for taking the IT Help Desk to the next level. Well, actually it’s about fixing what’s broken and reworking the people, processes and technology components in order to be a great, service-oriented help desk with happy customers and happy, motivated employees. And yes, it is possible to have it all.
At any rate, I read this blog entry by Tim Heuer recently, and it illustrates well the common problem with IT support processes. Read and weep.
When you read something like that and both laugh and cringe (mostly cringe in my case), it makes you think.
ITIL, COBIT, and everything else standards-based aside, there’s a whole slew of internal motivations and behaviors common to IT organizations and customers, yet not really addressed by standards, that can make or break the success of your service desk and organization. Having processes and checklists in place is great, but what makes for a really great IT organization? What makes someone a great help desk customer?
You never get perfect (on either side of the desk). But you can run a practice that is measurably successful and does more than maintain status quo (not always a good thing, by the way) and just get the job done.
What are some of your help desk stories, good or bad? What have you seen that works? For all that is decent and tactful, please don’t disclose your employers, any people or specific teams here (or they’ll be deleted). But some illustrations would be great. Just be nice. :)
[tags]IT help desk, itil, cobit[/tags]
2 Comments
Carl Atkins
October 18th, 2007
at 3:32am
This happened many years ago, and I think it was the ’straw’ that finally got a standard security practice put into use.
I was a Network Analyst at a major university. I needed an additional hard drive. The Help Desk took the request and delivered a used drive for me to install. No problem, right? Wrong! It seems that the drive had not been sanitized and even had the complete POP’d email from the previous user. Now this might not be so bad, except the drive was from the system of the wife of the universities president. When I mentioned what happened, the word got to my then boss and in less than 4 hours of getting the drive, the same Help Desk person who delivered it was back to pick it up. Of course, by that time I had re-formated it, but I let them take it anyway.
Now I drive a school bus, because management there never got any better at being pro-active.
Matt Wilkinson
October 18th, 2007
at 7:35am
Greg — you’ve hit on something very near and dear to my heart. I think the IT Service Desk is still the “whipping boy” within any formal IT Organization, which is such a shame. Often looked upon as a necessary evil, I think the Service Desk, run properly, can become a huge asset. perhaps not a strategic asset, but when you consider that the service desk is really on the front lines of employee productivity, it is a vital function. When it performs poorly, end users suffer. When end users suffer, chances are the organization as a whole will suffer. There’s plenty of blame to go around: slashed training budgets, poor hiring decisions, poor leadership, unrealistic expectations. These are all correctable issues, and not necessarily expensive ones.
So I share your passion about this topic, and would be anxious to share in your conclusions… perhaps even contribute to them if you’d like to draw from my experiences.