Service desks can be a maelstrom of activity, with tickets building up throughout the day, logged by increasingly impatient and frustrated people, all of whom are confident that their problem is the most urgent. Managing tickets according to priority and submission time may well have worked in the past. Today, IT service desk requests aren’t so simple. It’s no longer about straightforward, easy-to-solve issues sent by people who don’t know very much about computers.

Today’s workforce is savvy – and there’s some impressive technology used around the office. When an IT issue comes up, the instinctive go-to is the IT service desk, and the expectation is that the IT team knows exactly how to get email working on a device they may never have seen before.

That’s just one example from a long list of problems the IT service desk is faced with every day, as it battles to keep the lights on. And dedicating all of their time and intellect simply to “keeping the lights on” stops IT experts from dedicating their knowledge to the more strategic activities that would bring value to the businesses they serve.

Here are three tips to move beyond “keeping the lights on” to create a smarter IT service desk for your business:

Turn to social collaboration
Social media and the internet have opened a world of collaborative platforms where people help each other. Consumer forums, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are awash with people seeking answers to issues. And because other people have had the same or similar problems before – there are often solutions and answers posted.

Smart IT service desks can make the most of social collaboration by capturing content during employee engagements, social interactions and existing requests. They can then identify solutions to IT pain points facing employees.

By consolidating this knowledge, the IT desk encourages intelligent employee self-service, bringing logical answers to quickly solve problems faced by IT staff and employees with strong, natural language search and knowledge management, so solutions for users are contextually relevant and accurate.

Make the most of big data
When people post problems on social and collaborative platforms in any office environment, it creates a wealth of unstructured data – rich material that, when harnessed and analysed, provides companies with useful information.

IT service desks can be made much smarter with turbo-charged analytics, which allows IT teams to quickly trawl through a goldmine of unstructured data, find connections between structured and unstructured information, identify trends and better understand user sentiment.

This process can help smart IT desks better anticipate user pain points, reveal solutions to existing issues before they escalate into serious problems, and even align better future business needs before they happen.

Ditch the tickets
With a ticketless approach to the IT service desk, the IT department can dedicate more time to applying its expertise to driving innovation, further improving employee productivity and focus on initiatives that take businesses forward. User frustration is lowered, and rather than spending the majority of their time merely “keeping the lights on” the IT department can become a valuable, strategic force in driving business outcomes and employee productivity.

ABOUT BRANKO BUGARSKI//

Branko Bugarski is general manager, HP Software, HP South Pacific.

Booming demand for IT services has led many companies to embrace cloud computing, augmenting private infrastructures with on-demand public cloud resources. However, by using a variety of tools, the resulting siloed approach to management can create enormous drag on IT, stifle innovation and compromise agility. That, in turn, can handicap the company at a time when ever-changing business requirements demand precisely the opposite.

In the face of IT complexity and external pressures, such as increased competition and marketplace uncertainty, a new approach is needed, one that is specifically designed to meet the unique needs of cloud computing.

The key features of an optimal cloud management solution are:

Integral part of the cloud journey
Cloud is a journey, not an overnight transformation. As such, it can be divided into several distinct steps: consolidating and standardising IT resources to free up both staff and funding for your cloud initiative; automation of manual tasks and processes, which is a prerequisite for moving to cloud; self-service requesting by line-of-business users; operating and managing the complete lifecycle of these cloud services, from service creation to retirement; and finally, brokering internally created and externally sourced services.

Support for heterogeneous environments
In the real world, no large-scale cloud service delivery environment is going to be purely one type or the other, but rather, a mix of multiple elements. Thus, the most effective management solution is a single, comprehensive tool that takes care of the build, operate, and manage services in a heterogeneous environment with multi-vendor hardware, multi-OS, and multiple hypervisors.

Open and extensible architecture
Cloud environments should be capable of accommodating and adapting to business needs as they change over time—thus it is important to avoid getting locked into a single-vendor solution by keeping your environment open and flexible.

The optimal cloud management platform helps retain this flexibility by supporting publicly exposed APIs to facilitate integration with other third-party products. When building cloud services, it is critical to design for workload portability across public and private cloud.

A cloud management platform that supports open source cloud computing can help design for portable and interoperable services and avoid vendor lock-in.

Support for the entire stack
A solution that limits management capabilities to the infrastructure only also limits the ability to fully exploit the potential of cloud computing. The most effective solution will allow management of the entire stack—infrastructure (IaaS), platform (PaaS), and applications (SaaS)—not just infrastructure services.

Enterprise-grade capabilities
Cloud computing is a cornerstone of overall IT strategy and the tools used to manage the environment should reflect that importance. To support mission-critical applications, cloud solutions should be secure, compliant, and built on a highly available architecture, with the ability to scale infinitely and support large-scale enterprise applications.

Simplified, seamless user experience
In recent years, simple design and a seamless user experience have become the hallmark of many new consumer-facing applications, masking the complexity of the application underneath a modern and simple user interface. Today, line-of-business users expect this same simplicity, ease of use, and aesthetic appeal with their own IT applications.

Gone are the days when IT applications were skinned in visually unimpressive monotones—today’s user interfaces are colourful, playful and eye-catching, rendering perfectly on any device regardless of screen size or device type.