Providing Affordable IT Management to SME's Introducing the service desk
The concept of a service desk is probably one of the hardest to sell to a small business. Where staff levels are predominantly low, the thought of using valuable resource to wait for very irregular computer glitches to happen does not stack up. But the purpose of incident management should not be discounted based upon lack of resource alone. The key purpose of incident management is “to restore the service to the user as quickly as possible” – surely that’s a good thing for any small business?
So how do we get this benefit without having to throw a dedicated service desk at it? Well firstly if you look at a service desk in simple terms, it’s a single place where ever user of IT services contact if they have a problem. For an office environment this could be your receptionist or main admin person, in a hands on “industrial” business such as engineering or production it may be the person who does the payroll etc. Either way, you should be able to identify a person who could be you single point of contact.
Secondly the service desk would normally take the details and put them into a service desk call logging tool which would issue a unique reference number. Well unless you are having lots of issues and have a minimum of £5,000 to spend this luxury is probably not going to bring any benefit. BUT a simple logging and tracking tool could be set up using a simple spreadsheet or if you have database skills in your office, an access database could be used. Either way, this tool with allow two things; capture the basic information and issue a unique number.
Next? The service desk then manages the “incident” – by contacting the required support people and chasing them on a regular basis. If there are contractual obligations such as response and fix times, the service desk is the person harassing the suppliers to get their act together. Once again, our single person model allows this to happen. That person could quite easily be the person who rings your broadband supplier or contacts “the local man” who comes out to fixt the PC’s leaving your main workforce to get on with their day job. This person would have all of the information about your IT suppliers easily to hand, so if an incident does occur the service can be restored as quickly as possible (which includes not having to hunt around for phone numbers).
So far, we have been able to shrink the majority of the service desk and incident management processes into a single person (who will do this as a supplementary task).
The next chapter of this topic will concentrate on the areas of:
• First time fixes
• Workarounds and known errors
• Trend analysis
9th April 2009
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