Help Desk Becoming New IT Frontier?: Page 2 of 2

Both FreshDirect and Champlain College use ManageEngine help-desk and mobile solutions. “One of the key areas we focused on was mobile enablement of the help desk,” says Raj Sabhlok, ManageEngine president. “It’s important because for today’s IT, you want to be able to log an issue and you want the ability to get a real time response. You also want to be able to collaborate via chat with end users or other technicians.”

It isn’t hard to see how this ability to maintain a collaborative conversation where many get involved—and where everyone has real-time access to information—can also be transformed into a successful private-cloud application. The 360-degree visibility is what will enable end users and IT alike to use help-desk software to track not only progress on issues and issue resolutions, but cumulative service levels for mean time to response and for mean time to resolve a problem—likely areas for internal IT SLAs.

As IT enters an SLA culture, it will also be important to use business analytics to predict problem response and resolution trends before they become reality. New help-desk software solutions can facilitate this. “Help-desk software now has moved to a more holistic approach,” explains Sabhlok. “It now includes metrics that answer trending questions like which applications are creating the most problem issues? And is the average time to respond and to resolve a request increasing or decreasing?”

Answers to trends questions will enable IT to preempt 'problem' applications from generating more problems through rework of the applications—and they will also assist service level response monitoring by alerting managers as to whether time to respond and resolve are heading upward or downward. With the service expectations of IT rising, expanded help-desk capabilities couldn’t come at a better time.

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