- Service desks are under increasing pressure to align with business interests while struggling to keep pace with incidents and service requests. As the ticket backlog grows, service desks are losing sight of organizational priorities. End users are losing trust in the service desk abilities and turning elsewhere for technical support.
- Knowledgebase and self-serve projects have been started, but are often disjointed articles of information in non-usable formats. In other cases, these projects have been abandoned altogether.
- Some service desk managers feel that outsourcing will alleviate their burden, yet do not recognize that management demands will not be reduced by outsourcing.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- With automation and allocation – components of process standardization – service desks can enhance their knowledge management and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations.
- Common knowledge must develop into common practice. Individual knowledge that is loosely scattered throughout the organization must be extracted and embedded into systems, extended to IT staff, and then formatted to educate end users.
- As service desk effectiveness increases, end users gain trust in the service desk and eventually strengthen brand affinity for service desk offerings and the company in general. At this level, end users are well-engaged in the transfer of knowledge throughout the organization. Information from end users informs service desk processes and priorities.
Impact and Result
- This research will enable service desk teams to look beyond key performance indicators and near-term metrics in order to minimize ticket volumes by successfully pushing knowledge throughout the organization.
- An understanding of near-term undertakings like ticket template development and workflow definitions and longer-term projects such as knowledgebases and self-serve portals will help service desk teams inform their strategies and refine or rethink their day-to-day operations. In addition, the research will scope out the financial value of these near-term and long-term activities.
- This research will allow service desk managers and their teams to approach end users and organizational stakeholders to effectively address service gaps and re-establish service desk priorities.