One topic I’ve had in mind recently was whether a move toward adopting cloud-oriented IT will have any impact on the support team on the typical organization’s IT help desk, and whether our own HelpDesk product will need to develop new functionality. Attending the 451 Group’s recent conference on hosting and cloud transformation in London … Continue reading Cloud Strategy: implications for the Help Desk?
We were recently reviewing our investment options for our next business year. Having been lean enough to come through the crunch much better than many of our larger competitors, the discussion was proceeding along the lines of how to balance new spending on expanded development resource and expanded marketing and lead generation. Another option arose, … Continue reading Use the help desk to focus investment into your customers
IT help desks – opportunities for specialization Your IT help desk needs to meet all its SLAs, and excel in user feedback surveys, at the lowest possible staffing level. In the small to medium size organization, that probably means recruiting great quality support staff, all capable of dealing with any problems that the user community … Continue reading What-if? modelling on the HelpDesk
Very rarely do we talk directly about Vector products on this blog, but I am keen to take every opportunity to let the global customer base for PC-Duo know that this product has been fully Windows 7 compatible since the version 11.6 release earlier this year. We took a while bringing this to market; there … Continue reading PC-Duo remote control for Windows 7
We don’t get much snow here, so now that there’s a good covering, the road from my rural home here and the local road network generally are not where you want to be. The heater is on, and from the relative comfort of my home office I have a great view of the pristine snow … Continue reading Snowbound – the joys of a remote worker
Helpdesk and ITAM tools – measuring effectiveness We talk a lot about using surveys to gauge customer satisfaction with the service provided by the IT support help desk. What we don’t talk about so much is how we involve the analysts in assessing the effectiveness of the tools that we provide them with. A post on this blog a … Continue reading Help Desk analysts – valued for their views?
ITAM/ITSM opportunities for integration – right now We have talked before today about the broader opportunities for exploiting the data held in an IT asset management database. We have also talked about the integration of a help desk with other very separate systems such as customer information held on Great Plains, and such as incoming … Continue reading ITAM/ITSM in the cloud? watch out for integration challenges
ITSM and ITAM – why so separated? While some organizations are still struggling on with spreadsheets and clipboards, others have the vision to apply effort to continuously evolving their ITSM / ITAM processes. With each area of activity supported by its trade organizations, annual trade shows and conferences, I sometimes think we may be missing … Continue reading The help desk contribution to asset lifecycle management
Help desk software – powerful business process automation? In the last six months, some of our more forward looking customers have begun to exploit their Vector HelpDesk implementations in new ways, totally outside their original scope. Our foundation Issue Tracker architecture is configured with ‘Project Templates’ which contain the workflows, notifications, tabbed views, etc, which … Continue reading Your IT help desk – a business process trailblazer?
Help desk automation – who benefits most? Many of our international customers have support centers in the UK, and from time to time we hear that the UK is experiencing a considerable backlash against call center automation. To callers, the automation appears to offer nothing except frustration and delay. A succession of multi-choice questions to … Continue reading The role of self-help in IT support