Help Desk

For a little more than the last decade, my primary source of income has come from consulting. I help companies build and manage structures surrounding IT Services - like Help Desk, Asset Management, and Change Management.

While I can appreciate the need for my services, I also am of the mindset that I've made a great deal of money feeding the corporate beast rather than taming it.

In the last several years, ITIL has become the keyword of choice. Big companies are spending loads of money making sure there service structure is ITIL compliant so that they run their businesses effectively. While ITIL has it's place, it suffers a similar problem with other major standards - like certain ISO standards - in that the cost of becoming compliant with the standard can outweigh the benefits of attaining a business process that meets it. Additionally, the spirit of the standard is lost to the people who value it most.

Standards should be easy. They should be flexible. They should make sense to the most novice of observers. ITIL is not terrible in these respects, but the implementation of these standards by various software vendors, combined with the generally evident corporate mindset surrounding customizable software implementations is a recipe for disaster.

When running a Help Desk or a service center, it should be the first and foremost concern to ensure that the customer is helped out in the most efficient respectful manner possible. Secondary are all other issues and responsibilities. The fact of the matter is that the larger the service base, the lower on the food chain this primary goal becomes. Help Desk managers end up saddling their teams with more and more responsibilities, reporting and management structures become increasingly complex and difficult to deal with, and more time is spent meeting and planning than resolving issues.

I think about it like this - as a programmer, I sometimes end up spending a day figuring out how to automate a task that would over the course of my lifetime end up taken less time to do manually. Aside from the benefits of the gained knowledge, the effort is an entirely wasted one. Corporate America is doing the same thing taken to an exponential level - so large in fact that entire sub-economies have developed to feed the culture of wasting time and effort.

It is a goal of mine to implement a software solution that will actually serve to reduce wasted time and effort. Basic interface and methodology changes coupled with a no-nonsense business case for implementing revised simpler processes while increasing productivity and making employees and customers happier should do the trick. Even after I succeed (and I will succeed) there will be salespeople out there convincing more and more customers that a solution with an indeterminate life cycle, an unknown cost structure, and a nonsensical interface is a better solution because it is "ITIL Compliant". Should I extend the lifecycle of implementation and make the cost structure astronomical to compete? That might just do the trick, but it would be contrary to my primary goals. Conundrums, conundrums... (did I use that word correctly?!?)