How the emergence of the IT service desk changed the management of business processes and provided accountability for IT investments

For any business, ensuring value is gained from an IT investment is paramount but for the SME and other fast growing businesses, the need is particularly acute. Yet, despite this, it’s only relatively recently that the IT function has been subjected to the kinds of formal processes that govern other aspects of a business, such as sales, marketing, administration and finance.

Introduction of business processes into IT
It all began in the lead-up to the millennium, when mass hysteria and fear over what would happen to IT systems when the world entered the 21st Century predominated business chiefs thoughts. Would all networks collapse? Would companies be able to cope and deliver their services? Extensive media hype led companies to invest heavily in hardware and software tools to address potential problems. IT teamss had money thrown at them by the business and they bought accordingly.

However, organisations soon realised this was an error. The lack of business processes used in IT at the time resulted in unnecessary expenditure on a massive scale and business responded by developing processes to make IT more accountable and manageable. IT departments needed to know everything about their systems and integrate themselves fully with the wider organisation. They had to make wholesale changes and become a facilitator of the business; not only delivering a better service but also saving and making the company money.

IT geeks becoming business savvy?
Before this shake-up, the perception of the IT department was that it loitered in the background, occasionally surfacing to respond to problems with the system. IT dealt with user requests and system issues as they came in and this became the established approach to helpdesk delivery. Users within the business would call the IT department with a problem and technicians would endeavour to fix it as quickly as possible, with responsibility being passed from one person to another depending on the scale of the problem. This not only made it very difficult for the IT department to track the history of an incident but also to prioritise jobs effectively. The IT department needed to change how it was being perceived and the only way they could do this was by introducing formal management processes.

The IT director and manager has necessarily become more business-savvy and transformed from the ‘technical geek’ into the ‘strategic thinker’. Like any other part of the business, IT needed to improve its business processes. Previous less structured approaches to service had put the IT department under considerable pressure by making it impossible to set deliverable expectations and communicate them effectively to the organisation. They had to start communicating in a common business language that the whole organisation could understand.

As a result, service management has become critical in enabling IT to take a business driven approach to its management. IT directors and managers are increasingly looking to demonstrate the strategic business value generated by their department and deliver a higher quality service in line with the needs of the organisation it serves.

Emergence of the IT service desk
The key to the helpdesk maturing and evolving into the service desk was the emergence of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The approach was initially developed by Government departments as a framework to address IT service support and delivery issues and has subsequently been adopted by the private sector. In both the public and private spaces, it provides a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provision.

ITIL’s introduction has been vital for the development of business processes because it has established a set of guidelines and a common language for IT operations. This includes service delivery, problem resolution and solving customer enquiries, a language the whole business could understand.

Adopting this framework has helped IT departments manage their processes more efficiently and this in turn has reduced costs, improved productivity, use of skills and experience in the team and boosted customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery.

The formalisation of IT processes has spurred development in the systems designed to manage the helpdesk function. These service desk solutions are now playing a central role in facilitating, rather than dictating, business processes.

One of the key benefits of the service desk is that it has enabled the IT department to implement, monitor and manage service level agreements (SLAs) for its internal clients. SLAs can been allocated according to roles and responsibilities and can then be categorised under headings such as ‘critical’, ‘high’ or ‘medium’. This criteria can then be cross-referenced with the applications/assets these individuals need to perform their core functions. For example, remote access for a field engineer may be assigned ‘critical’ ranking because without it they can’t perform their job. In practical terms this means the IT department is now better placed to ensure its services are aligned with the requirements of the organisation.

It’s the implementation of these systems that can help IT managers record and evaluate the number of incidents their users are experiencing. Before IT departments improved the management of their processes, they ticketed isolated incidents and a problem couldn’t be identified because the incidents had no linkage or life-cycle. The introduction of the service desk has expedited this process, logging issues in a knowledgebase which is automatically searched when calls are logged to identify trends and previous resolutions. This ensures that time spent on more complex queries is maximised.

All these best practice processes make call handling as straightforward and effective as possible, both for the service desk and for the customer. By maintaining a detailed audit trail of call actions it ensures that anyone can rapidly familiarise themselves with the history of a particular query and pick up where the previous technician left off.

Future steps
With ITIL now an established framework, working towards standards such as ISO20000 is likely to become a major priority for IT departments. ISO20000 comprises two distinct documents: a specification for a service management system and a code of practice. Together, these form a top-down framework to define the features of service management processes that are essential for the delivery of high quality services. As time goes on, more service providers and vendors are likely to adopt this as a means of demonstrating their expertise.

IT fights back
The millennium bug looked like it was going to crash head-on with IT and destroy everything in its path. Instead, it provided the ‘IT geek’ with an opportunity to fight back and emerge as a ‘strategic thinker’. By taking a business-driven approach and becoming definable, repeatable and measurable, the IT department has come round in full circle from being a perceived drain on budgets to a true facilitator of the business.