Help Desks :: essays research papers

Help desks must help themselves With no relief in sight, help desks need to be given the right resources.(Industry Trend or Event)Author/s Stannie HoltThe internal help desk has a precarious position in todays enterprise. Like Rodney Dangerfield, the help desk staff often gets no respect from its internal customers nor from executives who play them only as a cost center. But other times, like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, theyre your only hope.Insiders say that even though information technology is essential to productivity these days, minding the help desk is a thankless job whose burden will only increase over the next few years as ITs size and complexity multiplies. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel Better-designed applications, to a greater extent effective integration, and more Web interfaces could cut mastered on the IT clutter and therefore the help desk workload -- but not for years to come."The trend for service centers or help desks today is we get more a nd more stuff to support and more and more IT complexity," said Renee Seay, senior manager for IT Customer Service at semiconductor maker AMD, in Sunnyvale, Calif.Analysts say some large organizations use 30 to 50 different applications and types of hardw be. Some companies have separate help desks for different products, but most prefer the convenience of a centralized service desk.According to Kurt Johnson, vice president of service management at the Meta Group, in Stamford, Conn., in the past decade the number of calls to internal help desks has move up from one or one-and-a-half per employee per month to two calls, and is likely to hit three or more within a few years.There are several reasons for this growth, and they are not all bad, according to Johnson. First, there is "the continued proliferation of technology on the desktop," he said.For example, enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors much(prenominal) as SAP are trying to expand the scope of their manuf acturing and financial- oriented applications so a broader range of people can use them.Moreover, many ERP vendors are offering self-service features, such as letting all employees directly verbalism up their available vacation days, which means everyone must have access to these applications, not just the gay resources department, Johnson said.On the other hand, such self-service applications can also be a good way to cut down on calls by letting employees look up their own answers on a FAQ list or database, according to Cecil Lawson, director of executive services at Remedy, in Mountain View, Calif.