Help Desks :: essays research papers

Help desks moldiness succor themselves With no relief in sight, help desks need to be given the right resources.(Industry Trend or Event)Author/s Stannie HoltThe familiar help desk has a precarious position in todays enterprise. Like Rodney Dangerfield, the help desk staff often gets no respect from its internal customers nor from executives who see them only as a cost center. But other(a) times, like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, theyre your only hope.Insiders say that even though information technology is essential to productivity these days, minding the help desk is a thankless job whose burden will only increase over the contiguous few years as ITs size and complexity multiplies. But t injecther is a light at the end of the tunnel Better-designed applications, more legal integration, and more Web interfaces could cut down on the IT clutter and accordingly the help desk workload -- but not for years to come."The trend for value centers or help desks today is we get mor e and more stuff to wear and more and more IT complexity," said Renee Seay, senior manager for IT Customer benefit at semiconductor maker AMD, in Sunnyvale, Calif.Analysts say most whopping organizations use 30 to 50 different applications and types of hardw be. Some companies have recite help desks for different products, but most prefer the convenience of a centralized service desk.According to Kurt Johnson, vice president of service management at the Meta Group, in Stamford, Conn., in the past decade the number of c tout ensembles to internal help desks has risen from one or one-and-a-half per employee per month to two calls, and is likely to hit three or more within a few years.There are several reasons for this growth, and they are not all bad, according to Johnson. First, there is "the go on proliferation of technology on the desktop," he said.For example, enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors much(prenominal) as SAP are trying to expand the scope of the ir manufacturing and financial- point applications so a broader range of people can use them.Moreover, many a(prenominal) ERP vendors are offering self-service features, such(prenominal) as letting all employees directly look up their available vacation days, which means everyone must have access to these applications, not just the human resources department, Johnson said.On the other hand, such self-service applications can also be a good room to cut down on calls by letting employees look up their own answers on a FAQ list or database, according to Cecil Lawson, managing director of executive services at Remedy, in Mountain View, Calif.