Once an enterprise has grown to the point where it must support employees over multiple office locations, the potential arises for a loss of control over daily operations. With the help desk working over capacity and the increased use of outsourcing for extra or more specialized help, proper management of the help desk is increasingly important. Some problems that may arise include:
- The core support group is overworked. The enterprise used to be able to rely comfortably on a small group of dedicated IT staff that supported one location. When the employee base grows and multiple locations require support, the core group of support staff is stretched too thin. Because the help desk is so overworked, it becomes too slow to respond to tickets. Meanwhile, workers sit idle waiting for help that may not be coming anytime soon.
- "Shadow" IT groups form. Remote employees may form a shadow group to support their own IT needs. Employees lose time working on their own tasks to provide support for co-workers. Aside from the cost of lost productivity, systems may also be compromised with the potential for improper diagnosis and remedy, the installation of unsupported software, and use of non-standard IT practices.
- Outsourced support is unmanaged. Outsourcing is utilized in a haphazard fashion, resulting in poor support or being unable to track and resolve common issues. More specifically, the outsourced help may be billing for work, software, or hardware not authorized by the IT group. This results in higher costs than budgeted and an increase in future TCO costs as the remote office diverges farther from IT standards.
- Information disappears. Incident logs are incomplete and audit trails are compromised making tracking and centralized management difficult or even impossible.