I personally hope and belive the ‘hot topics’ we should focus on are; goverance, compliance and security. In the ongoing climate, ensuring organisational, stakholder and customer confidence should be a key priority on every IT & Service Desk professionals agenda, along with the metrics & supporting evidence that allow ICT to demonstrate it’s true value to the business. NOW thats a real problem we all need to solve.
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Please no more fluffy elements (e.g. social,SAAS, Mobile). Back to IT Service Mangement is spot on.

Don Page

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1. Use it as a platform for outages. While people are connected to email all the time these days how many IT Notifications go unread because it is seen as “noise”? Leverage an ESN to send these notifications out, some ESN’s have built in SMS which is awesome because I finally got rid of my pager!!

2. ESN’s help people express their feelings about the systems they use and seek advice on the How To’s which if you were to pay a service desk to do that it would be costly.

3. Social Learning: Post training modules and other materials on your ESN, bet it is easier to find and more user friendly that crwaling SharePoint or some other Training Platform.

4. Use and ESN for sharing IT knowledge and Project Status’, people in your organization will appreciate it.

I can go on and invite anyone who wants to continue the discussion to reach out to me. I am sure I will get some negative responses but in a forum like this it is difficult to express your and my view…..Cheers!!

As others have posted, this already happens, the only slightly controversial bit to me is the ‘publishing’ of all calls live for all to see, as posted above this could waste a lot of time. The concept of social support doesn’t have to use social media, Matt’s example around printers is perfect. A few years ago we devolved printer toner purchasing and installation into the business. Some people were aghast but with a good training offering and key people in each area who helped others when it was their first time it’s been largely flawless, and no we haven’t see a rise in printer repairs as a result.

Looking forward to any follow ups and I’ll certainly be considering how I can introduce a gentle approach to social support within our business. Something along the lines of have you asked others around you if they’re affected type approach. This would have two benefits, one someone might have and might be able to offer help, two if they then log a call with the Service Desk they have a better idea of the impact than just logging it in pure isolation.