Abstract
Mobile devices and rising employee expectations are changing the rules for IT service management. The first new rule: move from queue-based service to schedule-based service.
The service queue was designed for employees who sat at the same desk every day, using equipment IT had bought and tested. It fits poorly with people who work from home, travel, and bring their own tablets and phones. To make the shift to scheduled service, IT needs calendaring that can read from the underlying ITSM system and from personal and team calendars such as Microsoft Exchange, so employees can book help at a time that suits them.
Three trends working against the queue
1. Employees are rarely in one place. The commute, the cubicle and the company-issued laptop are giving way to people working from home, coffee shops and airport lounges. IDC estimated that mobile workers would make up more than 75 percent of the white-collar workforce by 2013.[1] Fixing problems for people who are seldom in the same place at the same time is hard. The ITIL procedures many organizations follow were written for known equipment in known locations.
2. Employees bring their own devices. Bring your own device (BYOD) raises real security and compliance questions, yet many businesses have accepted it after research pointed to productivity gains among tablet users. About a million tablets shipped to business users in 2010, and shipments were forecast to reach 44 million by the end of 2012,[2] most of them owned by employees. Some observers expected employee-owned technology to overtake what employers supply.[3]
Many IT service groups are unsure of their role here. They don’t know the apps employees have installed, and there is still no good way to diagnose and fix a tablet or phone remotely. Employees, meanwhile, know where to go instead: Apple’s Genius Bar, Microsoft Store Answer Bars, and Geek Squad counters at Best Buy all help with these devices at little or no cost. An IT group that stays focused on internal policy risks losing relevance, and with it its place as a strategic partner to the business.
3. Help outside the company is better. At a Genius Bar, a consumer checks an online calendar, books an open slot, brings the device in and often has it fixed in under 30 minutes. Compare that with being number 139 in an IT queue and waiting days for an email, a call back or a technician.
Managers have meetings to run and reports to deliver. A technician arriving in the middle of a presentation is no help. They need to book a service visit or an appointment, at something like a corporate Genius Bar, that fits their own calendar. And for tablet and phone problems, many employees now turn to blogs, forums and Google searches before IT, because the answers are more current and arrive faster.
Where this leaves IT service management
“The traditional help desk is dying or dead in some organizations,” a Gartner analyst told Computerworld. “The ‘log it and flog it, detect and fix’ model is dying.”[4] That may overstate it (no enterprise runs on tablets and phones alone), but it shows where many organizations are heading.
“IT staff will have to make quick adjustments to meet the employees’ demands to work with their own devices and be able to support different devices and stay with the finger on the pulse of technology,” says Saar Bitner, executive vice president of strategy and marketing at help desk vendor SysAid.[5]
Some large enterprises have already set up Genius Bar-style help counters near headquarters. Intuit calls them Techknow Bars and features them in recruiting. SAP calls them Mobile Solution Centers and describes them as “a friendly (not adversarial) place for workers to come and browse mobile devices and apps and get unhurried, unpatronizing technical advice.”[6] At the time, SAP ran three centers and planned ten more. Intel and Hewlett-Packard, where more than half of employees used mobile devices and worked offsite, adopted the same model.
Apple’s scheduling system gives consumers full control over when and where they get service, with no phone queue or online ticket. In-store staff benefit too: the system books appointments and blocks out time based on the product and how long similar problems have taken to fix.
Help counters address BYOD. They do less for remote workers or for general frustration with how IT delivers service. The bigger obstacle is the queue itself. An employee logs a request, a ticket opens in BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, HP OpenView or a similar ITSM suite, and it works its way to the top before anyone responds. On the phone, the employee hears “Please continue to hold and you will be transferred to the first available member of the IT service desk team.”
Queues worked when IT knew the devices, the applications and where every employee would be tomorrow and the day after. Few of those conditions still hold. Android and iOS apps are unfamiliar territory for most IT groups. Remote and mobile workers don’t keep fixed schedules. And employees who get good service as consumers now expect the same at work.
Schedule it instead of queuing it
Apple’s Genius Bar takes walk-ins, but most customers use the reservation page: pick a store and a product, then choose from open slots in 10 to 15 minute increments over the coming week. Apple knows the common problems with its products and roughly how long each takes to fix, so there are no phone waits and no back-and-forth email.
The Genius Bar may not be the future of the IT service desk, but scheduled service is. Scheduling is the practical way to serve home-based employees who need a precise visit time, thousands of BYOD users across a metro area who need walk-in support, and employees who already have other places to get help.
Plenty of calendar-based scheduling and change management products link to an ITSM system to avoid change conflicts, schedule resources and announce outages. What IT needs goes further: a calendaring tool that reads data from ITSM applications, enterprise systems and personal calendars, lines up people, rooms and equipment, and then offers times to call takers or, for some requests, directly to employees. It should include or connect to workflow so that every resource a fix needs can be booked.
Two kinds of scheduling follow from this:
- Call-taker scheduling for “unknown” events, usually server, network or application problems. A trained call taker gathers details, classifies the issue, picks the right technical and on-site resources, and applies the rules for that type of request.
- Self-scheduling for a smaller set of “known” events: common laptop, tablet and phone problems, short on-the-spot training sessions and similar support.
In both cases the tools need to work with the underlying service management platform to:
- Track resource availability for individuals and groups over any time period.
- Apply business rules for resource use, such as round-robin dispatch or whether internal or contract staff take the job.
- Give call takers a calendar view with broad and drill-down perspectives on scheduled work.
- Give self-service requesters a simple calendar view, as easy as booking an Apple appointment online.
- Update resource availability automatically as appointments are booked or changed.
- Email both the technician and the requester when an appointment is set or changed, send reminders as it approaches, and let requesters reschedule from the same email.
The Kinetic Data approach
Kinetic Data offered two tools for this: Kinetic Request 5.1 and Kinetic Calendar 2.0. Kinetic Request is a request management portal that ships with Kinetic Task 2.0, a workflow engine for building workflows and approval processes triggered by events in other application databases.
Kinetic Calendar displays time-based information from BMC Remedy and other ITSM applications, syncs it with personal calendars in Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Microsoft SharePoint, and shows the result in drill-down calendar views. Separate calendars can be set up for IT, HR, facilities, product support, legal and other groups.
For schedule-based service, the three work together:
- Kinetic Request builds service request portals, including self-service portals, connected to the ITSM system underneath.
- Kinetic Task automates request routing and approvals and publishes appointments, with specific times, to IT staff calendars.
- Kinetic Calendar shows and tracks IT resource availability so staff can book without conflicts, and gives employees a Genius Bar-style calendar to book their own help.
These tools won’t eliminate the queue entirely. They give IT a practical alternative for employees who want to choose a time and place for laptop, tablet and phone support, for home-based staff who need to book a service call, and for anyone tired of waiting in line.
Sources
- IDC, http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=232073
- Velositor, http://velositor.com/2012/03/15/infographic-enterprise-tablet-usage-is-expected-to-increasesignificantly-as-44m-tablets-are-forecasted-to-be-shipped-to-business-users/
- Help Desk Guides, http://www.helpdeskguides.com/help-desk-trends-with-sysaid/
- Computerworld, “Help desk rebooted,” http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232218/Help_desk_rebooted
- Help Desk Guides, http://www.helpdeskguides.com/help-desk-trends-with-sysaid/
- ZDNet, http://www.zdnet.com/how-did-saps-cio-spend-his-summer-vacation-7000003264/