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Tablets, smartphones, and increasing employee expectations for faster, more responsive IT support are creating new ground rules for IT service management. New Rule #1—move from queue-based service to schedule-based service. IT organizations need a better alternative to the IT service queue, which no longer fits the needs and expectations of the increasing number of employees using personal tablets, smartphones, and other devices to get work done, along with mobile and remote workers who are seldom in the same place at the same time. What’s needed to support the shift from queue- to schedule-based service is calendaring capability with access to underlying ITSM systems, as well as personal and team calendaring applications such as Microsoft Exchange, to automate employee-empowered scheduling decisions.
Three seismic trends have quickly crept up on the insular IT service management world and now threaten to shake its very foundations: 1. The daily commute, the office cubicle, the conference room, and the companyissued PC or laptop are rapidly going the way of the rotary phone. Mobile employees working from home, coffee shops, airport lounges or any number of other places have rapidly replaced the desk-bound worker of the past, with some estimates putting the number of mobile workers at over 75 percent of the white collar workforce by 2013.[1] It’s an immense challenge for IT service management organizations to fix issues in such a vast, varied and unpredictable environment. Employees are seldom in the same place at the same time. And standardized ITIL policy-based procedures many organizations use were developed for known and tested equipment types and operating environments, not the freewheeling environment that is emerging today. 2. Increasingly, employees want to use their own tablets and smartphones for work. The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) phenomenon has been a nettlesome issue for many large enterprises since it introduces a host of data security and compliance issues. Recently, however, many businesses have started to embrace the trend since discovering that a growing body of research points to dramatic improvements in productivity among workers using tablets. A million tablets were shipped to business users in 2010. That number was forecast to grow to 44 million by the end of 2012.[2] Most of these will be owned and controlled by employees. In fact, it’s likely that soon the technology provided by many employers will be inferior to the leading-edge technology owned by employees.[3] Many IT service organizations are struggling to find their role in a mobile device world. They’re not familiar with the countless apps employees have downloaded to their devices, and no one has yet come up with the technology to remotely diagnose and fix issues on tablets or smartphones. Furthermore, employees know a better alternative when they need help: Apple Store Genius Bars, Microsoft Store Answer Bars, Geek Squad counters at Best Buy, and other places that specialize in help with tablets and smartphones at little or no cost. If IT service management can’t adapt to this consumerized world, but instead remains focused on an internalized world of IT policies and procedures, it risks losing relevance, and worse, its role in providing strategic value to the business. 3. Employees now have more options to seek help outside the confines of the enterprise, and the experience is nothing like what they’ve encountered with corporate IT. Genius Bars let consumers peruse an online calendar, book a convenient open day and time, then bring their device into an Apple store and have it diagnosed and fixed by an Apple “genius,” often in less than 30 minutes. Contrast that with being number 139 in an IT service management queue and waiting days for an email response, a call back, or a visit from an IT technician. Employees and managers are under pressure to hold meetings, deliver reports, and in general get things done, usually through interacting with other employees. In this fast-paced environment, it’s simply not convenient to have an IT technician show up in the middle of a presentation or meeting to fix an issue. Instead, managers need a mechanism to schedule either a service visit or an appointment, in something like a corporate Genius Bar, that fits into their own busy schedules. And many employees would rather turn to blogs, social media, crowdsourcing, or Google searches than to IT when it comes to tablet and smartphone issues. They know the information they need will be more up-to-date and the resolution faster if not immediate.
Where Does this Leave IT Service Management?
Due to these three trends, “The traditional help desk is dying or dead in some organizations,” an analyst from the Gartner Group told ComputerWorld last fall. “The ‘log it and flog it, detect and fix’ model is dying.”[4] While that may strike some as an extreme prediction (an enterprise can’t be run on tablets and smartphones alone), it points to the direction in which many enterprises are now 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, the executive vice president of strategy and marketing at SysAid, a help desk software vendor.[5] One adjustment many big enterprises have already made is setting up Genius Bar-like help counters in and around corporate headquarters locations where large numbers of employees are based. Intuit calls them Techknow Bars and promotes the concept extensively in employee recruitment. SAP calls them Mobile Solution Centers and promises “a friendly (not adversarial) place for workers to come and browse mobile devices and apps and get unhurried, unpatronizing technical advice.”[6] Currently, the company has three such centers with plans to expand to 10 more locations. Other companies that have adopted the Genius Bar model include Intel and Hewlett Packard, where more than half of their employees are using mobile devices and working offsite. Apple’s Genius Bar scheduling system is changing the service experience of millions of consumers. They have complete control over when and where they schedule service and never waste a second in phone queues or online issue-logging systems. Apple Store in-store service reps benefit as well since the scheduling system automates appointments and automatically enters time blocks based on product type and the time needed historically to resolve similar issues. The Genius Bar approach is an attempt to deal with the BYOD phenomenon, but what of the other two trends that are shaking up IT service management—home-based and mobile workers, and growing employee dissatisfaction with the traditional IT service delivery model? The biggest stumbling block IT service organizations face in dealing with all three trends is the queue-based structure of most service desk systems. When employees log a service request, a ticket is usually opened in systems such as BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, HP OpenView or another legacy IT service management suite. The ticket works its way to the top of the queue, and eventually the service requestor receives a response, either by phone or email. If the system is phone-based, the call is placed in a phone queue and the service requestor is continually reminded with words no one relishes hearing—“Please continue to hold and you will be transferred to the first available member of the IT service desk team.” Many organizations with large volumes of service requests may see no alternative to the queue, but such a view is starting to crumble in the world of consumerized IT. In the past, the queuing worked because IT service organizations knew both the devices and applications employees used. Just as importantly, they knew where employees were located, and they knew they would be there tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the day after that. Increasingly, none of these conditions exists. Android and iOS apps are largely terra incognita to IT service organizations. Remote and mobile workers rarely follow fixed schedules that put them in the same place at the same time. And as for the queue experience itself—it’s becoming increasingly anathema to employees who are learning from the consumer world to expect customer-friendly service delivered on their own terms, when and where they want it, not service rooted in ITSM policies and procedures created for a relatively static enterprise environment that is rapidly disappearing.