Recognizing When You ve Outgrown Your Help Desk
Does this sound like you? Falling levels of data integrity and user satisfaction, rising levels of anxiety over SLAs and working hours, lengthening resolution timescales and missed deadlines for management reporting?
If it does, then the chances are that you've outgrown your help desk software and it's time to move up a size, perhaps to a third generation service desk (3GSD). Like wearing shoes the wrong size, it's not only painful to continue, it can actually do you damage. The good news is that it's unlikely to be as difficult, expensive or time-consuming as you're anticipating. Quite the contrary - a universe of efficiency improvements is waiting for you!
Most organizations start out with a help desk process that they've developed in-house; it may be built on Excel spreadsheets, Access or could even be paper-based. For a while it does just fine, but the key characteristic is its limitation; and soon it will unable to cope. With this kind of a system very little customization is possible, it's really hard to escalate issues appropriately, and it's a single-user system so data's often out of date. This we'll call First Generation Help Desk.
Or perhaps you're already using a second generation system, one of the 100s of non-configurable software packages out there; like Track-It, HelpBox or Richmond SupportDesk. Some of these are great little products which have been designed to drop into place quickly and easily and start delivering instant ROI. They're a big improvement on a first generation approach and may be just the job for organizations that have a very small IT team, don't have a lot of structure to work around and are happy to bend their approach to suit the software.
These products are pretty cheap too; they don't need a consultant to deploy them as no configuration is possible and only minimal training is needed to get up and running. However, these benefits are also their undoing. Improvement, evolution and enhancement is nature and its common for users of second generation products to begin to see their failings after quite a short period of time and the structure that was once helpful begins to feel restrictive.
To move up to the next level, the third generation, is a step change for most organizations and marks the transition from a Help Desk to a true Service Desk. At this level IT Managers are able to capture much more information, and manipulate it to suit the department and business requirements. For instance, they may need to have tighter control and better reporting on SLAs than is possible in a second generation environment. Or they may require improved integration capabilities, for instance with an asset management, or network discovery product or with Active Directory.
And of course if you're going to pursue an ITIL-ised future then you certainly need to move to a 3GSD.
CRMWorks are one of the leading helpdesk software firms in the UK. They specialize in helpdesk software and IT service management