Help Desks :: essays research papers

serve up desks must champion themselves With no relief in sight, help desks shoot to be given the right resources.(Industry Trend or Event)Author/s Stannie HoltThe internecine 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 all as a cost center. But other 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 accuse will only increase over the next few age as ITs size and complexity multiplies. But there is a informal at the end of the tunnel Better-designed applications, to a greater extent effective integration, and more weathervane interfaces could cut win on the IT clutter and therefore the help desk work load -- but not for years to come."The trend for do centers or help desks t oday is we get more and more stuff to support and more and more IT complexity," said Renee Seay, senior manager for IT Customer Service at semiconducting material maker AMD, in Sunnyvale, Calif.Analysts say most large organizations use 30 to 50 varied applications and types of hardw be. Some companies have separate 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 calls to internal help desks has risen from wiz 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 continued proliferation of technology on the desktop," he said.For example, enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors such as bore are trying to expand the scope of their manufacturing and financial- oriented applications so a broader range of people abide use them.Moreover, many ERP vendors are oblation self-service features, such as letting all employees directly grammatical construction up their available vacation days, which means everyone must have recover to these applications, not just the human resources department, Johnson said.On the other hand, such self-service applications can also be a good way to cut down on calls by letting employees look up their own answers on a FAQ list or database, according to Cecil Lawson, director of executive go at Remedy, in Mountain View, Calif.