The future of Service Desks is customer request centers. They will be designed with an outside-in approach that flips the traditional focus on technology to an emphasis on business demands and user expectations. While IT Service Management has already shifted IT to a service delivery model rather than the traditional technology availability focus, the next generation of service management technology emphasizes customer experience and business self-service.
Key attributes of this model include:
- Process-based: Today’s Service Desk should include significant process automation – not just basic tasks like approvals, but connecting human and system tasks throughout request fulfillment, spanning IT and business areas such as Finance or HR.
- Insight and transparency: IT staff, line-of-business owners and users all need role-based visibility.
- Easy to measure and adapt: You need good metrics and simple methods for adapting to change.
To achieve this vision, I recommend starting with a self-assessment. Here are some questions that can help you examine your current state.
| How we’re doing | Need for improvement | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strong yes | Mostly yes | 50-50 | Mostly no | Not at all | Urgent | Important | |
| Do you have a User Request Portal that lets users find information, perform self-help processes and submit tickets? | |||||||
| Did you usability-test your User Request Portal implementation before launching? | |||||||
| Are most users successful in helping themselves (or do you get a lot of tickets for issues that should have been resolvable by self-help without a ticket submission)? | |||||||
| Behind the scenes, have you automated processes that users are likely to use? Do you measure their successful use and adapt as needed? Can you add or change processes easily? | |||||||
| Can users access a knowledge base that explains their issue? | |||||||
| Can users gain visibility into the status of a request on their own? | |||||||
| Can users easily respond – and get a response from IT – when they are not satisfied with the outcome of a ticket they submitted? | |||||||
| Do you facilitate input from users on how to improve the site and your services? | |||||||
| Do you regularly measure benchmarks for self-service and conduct surveys to assess user satisfaction? | |||||||
| Do you have plans in place to continually assess and improve the User Request Portal? Are your portal and its underlying processes easy for IT staff to adapt? | |||||||
If your answers are not overwhelmingly yes, then you are ready to investigate and evaluate a new approach to ITSM. Do you have comments or additional assessment questions to add?
