James West, editor of Service Desk 360 is incredulous to the fact he has written about IT support for ten years. Here he challenges us to look at what lessons we have learned and what we need to focus on to ensure continued success.

I realised recently that I’ve been covering the IT support market for ten years almost to the week. Some of you may remember the old broadsheet-sized magazine I started off writing for, Customer Service News, which grew out of an even older title, Service International. I inevitably began thinking retrospectively about how the industry has changed over those ten years and how it would be a good point of conversation for the launch of Service Desk 360.

Improvements in IT support

My natural thought process was to think that IT support has improved and professionalised over the last decade, and in many ways it has. The huge uptake of ITIL has underpinned many of the changes in the industry, creating a clear and proven way of managing support and its surrounding dependencies. Organisations such as the SDI, itSMF and VCM with the ServiceDesk show have created focal points of discussion where people have been able to troubleshoot and benefit from shared experiences. The improvements in the basics (a defined and well developed helpdesk) have been so pronounced that we have now moved into the next level of development, with the creation of the service desk – a proactive IT governing force which (hopefully) ensures that all IT services deliver meaningful benefits to business users.

It is tempting to conclude that these changes have simplified IT support, but I don’t think they have. The explosion in web usage and latterly web-based applications, the proliferation of mobile devices, and the massive increase in reliance on IT for all aspects of business have upped the stakes considerably.

Taking stock of the online revolution

Drawing from my own experiences, when I started in the industry in 1999, all of our work was offline, press releases and photos were sent to us through the post, files were copied to floppy disk and given to the designer to put on the magazine pages. There was no office network and our reliance on IT, in comparison to now, was minimal. Today, I need a laptop, a fast web connection, and, err, that’s it. But behind the scenes, the IT complexity is many magnitudes greater than it was in the late nineties, but it is just hidden, thanks to better software, better support (especially online) and better understanding of the systems that facilitate this simplicity. This sums up the challenge that faces IT support now. Users expect instant on, instant backup, instant service, and they expect that their changing needs will be accounted for. They also want all this to happen in the background, but they also need to understand the powerful role of IT support otherwise the service desk might find that funding is cut.

What does the support industry need to do to accommodate all of these changes? I leave that topics open for you to debate, and if you have any memories, good or bad, of the support industry in the last ten years, please share them here.