COVID-19: How is the Service Desk coping with home working?
Last week, in the first video of this series, Nick Brailsford, from South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive explained the build up to the COVID-19 lockdown, and the sterling efforts from IT teams to get everyone working from home.
That period is largely behind us now, and in this second video, Michael Sharp, Help Desk Manager at JMW Solicitors shares his experience of how life on the service desk has changed over the last week or two.
Now that home-working is up-and-running, how are service desk teams are managing? Which metrics can be used to monitor service desk performance? How are IT teams dealing with requests from furloughed staff, and how is the service desk verifying the identity of people calling for support?
Micheal says that his team are now seeing a shift from incidents, to service requests, as staff look to improve their homeworking environments. He explains how 'paper-light' departments are coping well, but other departments with analogue practices are really struggling. Although this is no surprise, it does make a rather solid case for digital transformation of back office functions and more widespread use of Enterprise Service Management.
We discuss how cloud-native SaaS truly enables people to work from anywhere, and Mike tells me how, as the lockdown went into high gear, he was sat in his car, on holiday, automating ITSM processes on his mobile phone. ITSM tools have come a long way in recent years in terms of innovation, agility and ease of use!
Towards the end of the video, I make a prediction, that IT functions which were already perceived as a cost before COVID-19, are likely to have further cost-reduction and efficiency measures imposed upon them. However, IT groups that were already perceived to be adding value, will get further investment to drive digitization and increase business resilience using cloud technologies.
Enjoy the video and watch this space for more content, as I catch up with the experiences of other customers. Our industry has never been more visible, and in most cases, IT is shining.
There has never been a better time to get serious about collaboration, and you can read more about how to drive this in our latest Smart Guide: Creating effective Collaboration in the remote working organization.