News

A friend was telling me recently about his company’s general frustration with their IT support provider. (I’d love to quote for a better service but they are unfortunately tied in to a long contract with this provider).

Vicious circle

Despite the fact that the support techs involved are hard working, competent guys with great customer service skills, the client company’s productivity was suffering and frustration levels were rising.

The support people did not seem to value the users’ time and thought nothing of spending several hours on a user’s PC working through an issue. Persistence is often laudable but in this case the user was held back from her work for half a day leading to a knock on effect on productivity throughout the company. This kind of cure often causes more pain than the original problem.

Priorities were decided by a combination of who-shouts-loudest and first-in-first-out. The same faults occurred time and again and lessons learned by one tech are not shared with others.

The support techs’ hard work, dedication and technical skill were simply not enough to deliver the productivity gains expectated from the company’s investment in up to date IT systems. Users and IT provider are caught in a vicious circle where the users’ level of frustration continues to escalate.

Structure

In my opinion things will not improve at this company unless some structure is applied to the support effort, such as the ITIL framework for instance. Some may dismiss ITIL as being over-bureaucratic, designed by civil servants with too much time on their hands or assume it is a job creation scheme created by and for the IT industry.

Our own use of ITIL at ISN has provided us with a toolkit of best practice which deliver real benefits which result in happier users long term. Adopting just a few ITIL best-practice approaches would unglue the wheels and increase productivity for my friend’s company and result in bottom line savings.
Just to pluck a few examples out of the air:

• Having senior engineers dedicated to “problem management” would address the underlying causes of common faults and prevent them recurring
• Agreeing a method with management for “incident prioritisation” would reduce impact on the company’s core activities
• Developing a searchable knowledgebase from information logged regarding problem resolution would shorten fix times

The fact is that most office workers can’t get their job done without reliable IT systems. With the pace of modern working life, any hold up wastes time and money and increases stress levels for end user and IT staff alike. Adoption of ITIL does not have to be all-or-nothing; a company can choose the elements that fit its business requirements and culture.

Tom Clowes, ISN’s service delivery supervisor, recently gained the ITIL v3 Foundation Qualification.

ISN are firm believers in #ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) as a structure for delivering and managing IT services. It has been developed as a framework, originally by the UK Government, covering all aspects of providing IT infrastructure services reliably, effectively and efficiently.

We are far from being slaves to the ITIL rule book however; customer satisfaction is always the compass we use for providing services. There is no point reinventing the wheel however and we are always keen to learn from best practice that has been shown to work in many countries and many industry sectors.

Tom brings the number of ISN staff with ITIL qualifications to five.

Now that Internet connections are faster, cheaper and more reliable, offering services across the net can be a reality.

This year I have sat through too many presentations on the topic of Cloud Computing. These are usually at vendor events where they explain how their products are the key to unlocking the benefits of Cloud Computing.

Along with Virtualisation, the “Cloud” has been one the favourite buzzwords of sales and marketing people across the land. These dull slideshows usually begin with “What is Cloud Computing? If you ask 10 people you’ll get 10 different answers” Yawn. Next they give the example of SalesForce.com as a leader in the field. As if we didn’t know. (The BBC have been offering “cloud” services for decades: you don’t have to have a band in your living room to listen to some music, like you used to in the olden days).

#CloudForce

The truth is that most people in business and the IT industry have a crystal clear understanding of what Cloud services offer. This was apparent from the packed audience of at least a thousand eager attendees at SalesForce’s CloudForce event yesterday at the Novotel in Hammersmith.

#SalesForce’s charismatic CEO Marc Benioff gave a compelling and very polished keynote presentation of how their products are changing how companies can get better applications to their staff far more quickly and far more affordably.

Quick effective ERP over the web

Benioff drew in senior staff from companies such as BMC Software, Vetrazzo and the Daily Telegraph. For example Vetrazzo started up 4 years ago and turn recycled glass into kitchen worktops: they developed a whole business process management system in a few months using custom tools from SalesForce. The result is that they have something which is available to all their locations via the web and can be modified really easily to suit changing or new requirements.

#ITIL Helpdesk Example

BMC Software, vendors of helpdesk application Remedy, explained how they developed a fully functional ITIL conformant helpdesk system within 4 weeks. ISN are committed to using the ITIL framework throughout our company to deliver better service to our customers. So we were very interested to hear about this in particular.

#Cloud computing business tools

ISN have been using SalesForce.com for a few years now and find it a great improvement over other CRM systems we tried. We will be looking very closely at using SalesForce’s newest tools to develop new systems that support our own business and for opportunities where cloud services from #SalesForce and other organisations can help our clients businesses too.