service desk

Servicesphere brought to my attention the recently announced product from GMA that is an "ITIL-aligned SharePoint IT Service Desk Solution". I break out in a cold sweat just hearing that. So what is meant by "ITIL Aligned" and "Service Desk"?

I heard it first on @ServiceSphere's tweets. The analysts are losing interest in IT Service Desk tools.

Who does the service desk serve? That comes back to what the support service is there for.

According to news reports,

Workers at a government call centre were ordered to observe a three-minute time limit when using the toilet and keep diary entries of how long they spent in the bathroom.

From time to time, a consultant is in the position of explaining and justifying fundamentals. Recently I was describing how incidents are not the same thing as calls, that every call is not a new incident if the same user has already called about the same incident previously, that it is more effective to record the call history on the same incident. I went to three sources of "best practice" for support - there isn't any.

A discussion on LinkedIn prompted me to comment that KEDB is a subset of knowledge management for service desk. I think it is important to take a broader view and provide access to more general information about solutions to incidents and resolutions to requests, not just workarounds to known errors. I've seen folk micro-design that one bit without considering a more generally useful system. I never quite understood why ITIL seems fixated on KEDB, giving it a disproportionate amount of attention vis-a-vis the more general support knowledgebase. Thoughts?

I'm a good citizen of the internet communities I inhabit. If something is not useful to me or could be improved, then I generally use the written contact mechanism to let them know. I'm a smart guy and tech-savvy so my messages are - I hope - pretty clear and to the point (if a bit abrasive - it's just the Antipodean in me). But I don't have a good success rate with them.

As we said before, Real ITSM does things differently to, say, ITIL. Readers may recall that Real Priority (also known as Care Factor) is measured by the number of metaphorical fans that are being hit by effluent: it starts at zero and goes up. More conventionally, Real ITSM also tracks a separate User Priority (also known as the Dummy Factor, for the number of dummies being spat).

An ITIL V3 report from Sunrise Software is rich in crap factoids, since the report itself suffers from all the methodological deficiencies we have described before. Mercifully this one may not get much airtime so we rate the risk Medium.

This post is longer than normal but you may find it entertaining as an example of

1. how not to do Level 1 support. All the politeness in the world is no substitute for actually listening, and having some understanding of the environment
2. where email-based support (as compared to actually talking to people) can go wrong