Is social media really a useful tool for ITSM? Can collaborative IT support complement rather than destroy our service desks? Maff Rigby of IT SmartDesk shows us why we cannot ignore the impact of social and what the future of support will be like.
IT was once regarded as the saviour of business – something that enabled us to become more competitive within a rapidly growing marketplace. IT was a bit of a mystery to most of the business, with only the IT department possessing the skills and knowledge required to understand IT and how to use it effectively.
This situation has changed dramatically over the past 5 years, as IT has become much more accessible and easier to understand by those in “non-technical” roles within the business. Anyone can set up a web server or an FTP server with a credit card and a few clicks of the mouse, as opposed to a project plan and an in-depth knowledge of PC hardware and network protocols.
It’s not surprising therefore that the speed at which business is moving has overtaken the traditional IT department, which is still trying to maintain control of the IT services it provides rather than embracing this new era and enabling the business to use IT in the way it chooses. This is a situation reminiscent of the music industry in its fight against internet piracy, and the dramatic and difficult transformation it has endured reminds us that ignoring new phenomenon is not an option.
IT support is just one of the areas that must change to keep up with the speed of business. The traditional service desk just doesn’t fit in with today’s IT-savvy organisations because IT users are increasingly bypassing the service desk and turning to faster and more user-friendly routes to IT support (often through search engines or social networking sites). The good news is that it’s pretty straightforward to change this by giving IT users the tools and freedom to embrace the ways in which they are becoming accustomed to working in.
Social IT support – what is it and how does it work?
Whether your focus is on corporate IT support or commerce-based IT Support, everyone needs help sometimes. While traditional IT support is built on a closed “one-to-one” communication between you and your service desk, social IT support is built on an open “one-to-many” communication between you and your community.
To illustrate how social IT support works, let’s think of a typical scenario. Jeff is a sales manager in a small organisation of 30 people, with one full-time IT support person, Derek. Jeff has an important meeting in an hour and he is having major problems printing the latest sales reports for that meeting (because printers never work when you need them to).
Traditional IT support:
Jeff raises an incident in the service desk portal. The service desk remains the owner of this support ticket until it is resolved. The communications go between customer and service desk. No one else is involved, and no one else has any visibility of the ticket and the issue being discussed. Derek sees the call arrive, but is working on something that is more important (the finance system has just crashed, and the month-end reporting is due today). Jeff’s printer problem isn’t resolved in time for his meeting, the meeting has to be re-scheduled and business productivity suffers as a result.
Social IT support:
Jeff raises an incident in the service desk portal in the same way as the traditional IT support model, except this time his incident is visible to the entire community (i.e. the 30 people in his organisation). Derek is still busy with the high priority finance system issue, so doesn’t pick this ticket up. Lottie (marketing manager who is on her coffee break) sees Jeff’s cry for help and knows exactly what to do, because she had that same problem yesterday. Lottie picks up and answers Jeff’s ticket, enabling Jeff to fix his printer problem. He attends the meeting armed with the sales reports, and productivity is unaffected.
Admitedley, this scenario is somewhat idealised, but it illustrates what is at the core of social IT support – people in an organisation can help deal with each other’s IT issues, because everyone has some knowledge or experience with IT anyway. It works in exactly the same way as Wikipedia or Yahoo! Answers – the knowledge is out there, you just need a way of harnessing it.
Next steps
It’s relatively easy to introduce social IT into your business. Since most, if not all of your employees or colleagues will already understand the concepts of social media through their use of platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, all you need to do is enable these ways of working within the workplace. There are a growing number of social IT service management platforms emerging, either built entirely on the concepts of social media, or integrating some of these concepts to enable organisations to embrace this new way of working.
Maff Rigby is the founder of IT SmartDesk.
Copyright © 2013 ServiceDesk360 All Rights Reserved.
I’m sorry, but this is total non starter in the real corporate world. Or any other world for that matter.
As a comparison, we all know about money but I’m sure that the finance department wouldn’t allow us to meddle with corporate finances.
Idealised is right here, there are many people who believe that they have all the answers who spend thir life on “Social Networking” sites. So the scenario is similar to that described above. However it is the other way round the Finance call goes out on to the Social web service. Joe Bloggs Mr Know All immediately responds and provides a suggestion to resolve the issue. The owner of the Finance system applys the fix and Bang goes the lot, all the reports are corrupted and it will then take your IT support Professional 2 weeks to recover them. Who takes the responsibility Mr Know All won’t. as the Finance user did not really understand what Mr Know All was suggesting as a fix and pressed the delete key rather than the insert.
Because some one knows a particular Office tool well does not mean that they know about the infrstructure behind the very complex systems that exist in todays technological world. The more devices and systems that are introduced the more complex the support model is.
I’m not saying Social Media cannot be of help, but when it is relied upon to have the users sort their own problems out rather than plan their work in a more timely fashion I can see even more disruption. If the work is planed and there are issues the hard pressed support technician will then have a bit more time to resolve them.
Martin and John.
I agree the model proposed here is simplified (Maff himself admits its an idealised example) and there are many issues that have to be addressed before this vision becomes a reality. For me the point is that no matter how inconvenient and troublesome Mr Know All is to the corporate infrastructure and traditional IT support model, he is real and this style of ‘ask a friend’ has become the accepted norm. The questions to ask are why our staff are increasingly deciding to bypass the service desk; what are we doing wrong and what can we change to ensure that we work with our users? Ignoring the issue because it upsets the status quo is not an option in my opinion, we need to either work with it or provide a better alternative.
I can see this working to a limited degree, but I work at a university, rather than the corporate world, so things are less tied down than most environments and we have super-users in many departments. Students are already including their own fixes on blogs (e.g. how to pick up college email on their Android phone); we work closely with the student union and our Communications department in using Twitter and Facebook and so on. I suspect we will be utilising some social media aspects of our new service management system when it goes live, but only once the more traditional support services are in place. Interesting article.
Lottie wouldn’t want me as her Marketing Director after behaviour such as that. I’d be asking her, in no uncertain terms, why she thinks she should meddle in critical systems she neither designed nor has responsibility for. Moreover, I’d be asking the IT Director at the next board meeting, just how much risk he expects this business to carry just because his department cannot foresee and hence cannot deal with simultaneous mission-critical failures. Derek’s isolation is an example of why we should run IT support more like the Fire Service, with built-in slack (http://amzn.to/wrFoAX), because when disaster strikes, the cost of lost productivity rises sharply and IT Support had better be there. Facebook et al won’t fix this issue. What is needed is good IT support management with a perspective on the business importance of IT support.
Your example of running IT like the Fire Service is an interesting one… ironically, here in NZ the “slack” is taken up using volunteers. Is that not unlike relying on the wider organisation to help solve a problem…? I think the idea of collaborative IT support has some merit, definitely for application and lesser technical issues. This would take load off the core IT support to deal with the mission critical issues as they come up. So I see collaborative IT as complimentary to specialist IT support, even in a corporate environment.
ServiceDesk360,
I don’t see the bypassing of the Service Desk. Yes, I see the asking of friends and colleagues for their help or opinions but ultimately all IT problems I witness are resolved via the experts employed to do so. The IT support staff.
Supporting IT devices in the home is one thing but to support them in a corporate environemnt is quite another. The abundance of policies, security, auditing, restrictive permissions, etc, etc. means a non-IT employee will never be able to resolve IT issues. For example, a local printer cannot be installed/administered without appropriate permissions being assigned to the user on that particular Windows based PC. For server based printing the restrictions are even greater. Similarly, a non-IT user would never have the permissions assigned in order to alter network setting on their PC. Nor would they understand how to in the first place. Any business or public organisation in their right mind would never tolerate non-IT staff ‘fiddling’ with their IT equipment. The consequences would be horrendous.
This article is totally out of touch with reality and raises the question of the author’s experience in the field.
Thanks all for the comments and feedback so far.
I must stress that the example I gave in the article is an idealised example to illustrate the concept of Social IT support. By no means am I suggesting that the IT support function should be handed over entirely to non-IT employees, but by enabling them to help each other with every day IT issues (most of the stuff we deal with in 1st line support) the IT experts can focus more on the critical IT projects that help to move the organisation forward.
IT users already ask each other for help, and they often bypass the Service Desk in favour of finding the answer through Google, or asking their connections on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIN. Why? Because it’s using a communication method that is now second nature to most people, plus it’s often quicker than contacting the Service Desk.
With Social IT we have an opportunity to embrace the new ways of working and communicating that have emerged through Social Media, and use them to the advantage of the business as a whole.
‘ask a friend’ is real world computer support. People are lazy or don’t want to reveal their lack of knowledge in front of the experts or don’t get quick response from the ServiceDesk.
IT – tie down your systems to prevent users from causing major problems; promote the swapping of ideas between users to allow quick-fixes on non-critical issues. Get users to answer ‘Calls’ properly by recording what their advice was (try and get your Systems Engineers to do the same thing) That stops by-pass of the ServiceDEesk, provides quick fixes in a resource hungry world, and gives the ‘experts’ a lead on what went wrong if colleagues provide the wrong ‘fix’.
Ban Facebook, it’s gossip, provide a useful social tool within your ServiceDesk application and improve service to your end-users.
The collective hive mind of IT support is more knowledgable and timely than any individual or small-to-medium organisation can be. With an exponential increase in the complexity of systems a failure to tap into that hive mind will leave your business behind. The only remaining question is how can you position your business to take advantage of this opportunity? Thankfully with cloud services and more open platforms this is becoming easier and easier.
Look at the success of Stack Overflow and Super User as examples of how social networks are changing the way we develop and program our software.
http://blog.stackexchange.com/
http://superuser.com/questions
Aale Roos and I have been doing our own thinking about what the service desk of the future will look like. One of the key points we believe is that user behaviour WILL change. If I’m using Google Docs and have an issue I’m more likely to use the Google help facilities and forum first, before turning to the internal desk, at which point I’m likely to know more about the issue than the service desk staff.. Maff might be using an extreme example, but don’t kid yourselves about the level of peer to peer support that goes on even today. Is that because their peers know more than support staff, or is it because the experience of getting help from a peer is more comfortable than getting it from IT ?
“Ask a friend” is extremely common and social IT would enable the capture and reporting of the kinds of trivial incidents that social IT could solve. RAStocks is right. IT still has control over the systems to prevent unauthorised “changes”.
Here’s another thing: if service desks kept accurate incident/problem reports and current knowledge bases, they could select the items to publish to the public KB (within the company), which would allow end-users to fix their own trivial incidents by following a good set of instructions. Takes a load off the service desk and engineers, is still curated by the service desk, but at no additional time spent because the service desk/engineering should already be documenting anyway.
Paul Carter makes a lot of sense – sharing at some level on blogs, forums, dedicated twitter or facebook sites is helpful and encourages user colaboration (and is nothing new to be honest – perhaps people forget that when they google for an answer they are trawling stuff peope have shared in this manner).
Maff Rigby’s idealised example, whilst real world and sounding good has many downsides for the company, and works less well, the larger the organisation. If all our tickets were broadcast via socail media I hate to think how much staff time might be wasted looking at it ‘just in case I might be able to help, even though I’m not an IT person’. It’s not an efficient (i.e. cost effective for the organisation) model in general, but if used carefully for specific needs as Paul Carter suggest, then yes, it has a place.
A debate worth having – thanks to all.
Jim
Now, where’s that paper tape and punched card deck gone…..
Thanks all for the further comments. Clearly there are stong opinions both for and against the case of Social IT Support, which I take as a positive thing!
Stu – Stack Overflow is a great example of a croud-sourced knowledge base which has been built up from people helping each other out with technical queries. Whenever I have technical questions or problems, a Google search inevitably brings back Stack Overflow posts and most of the time they have the answers i need!
James raises a great question on why people turn to peer-to-peer support. My opinion is the latter – they are more comfortable receiving help from peers than from the Service Desk for a number of reasons (that could be a new article all together!).
Aprill – totally agree that IT still have the responsibility to decide what the IT users can and can’t control, and that IT could reduce their workload considerably by providing a lot more information to the users to help themselves. Social IT does this.
Jim – yes the organisations that are embracing this are the small-medium sized organsations at the minute. Don’t forget that we’re still at the beginning of this Social IT movement, and as our understanding of it matures I believe that larger organisations will adopt these practises.
Cheers,
Maff
With some of the attitudes in the thread, I can see why staff would rather ask a friend than go to IT. There is a lot of self-importance in IT because we’ve had to defend ourselves against the business treating us like mushrooms—in the basement and fed on manure (in place of a more robust word). However, the landscape is changing and employees aren’t all little old ladies with headsets and no idea, anymore. Some of your staff have a clue. And when I talk about trivial incidents, *I’m* not suggesting staff should go up and try to fix the printer, I’m talking about their own computer—things they could literally fix themselves, without extra permissions, if they knew how. The very same trivial crap that makes you roll your eyes, sigh heavily, and hate people.
I think Maff is on to something here.
In organisations where BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) is in place, supporting the different devices would be a struggle. However asking a friend in this manner would be very useful.
It would also allow the IT Department to spend more time on projects that will be of benefit to the organisation in the long term than just fire-fighting printer problems.
Thanks for your comments Aprill and Phil – Totally agree with your comments!
If the comments here are anything to go by I suspect the Brightalk Service Desk summit this week could be very interesting. Change is in the air.
Truly stunned by some of the comments here!
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.
This would actually work in the corporate world. It may start of small but it would grow for sure. The consumerization of IT is happening now and corporations have to get onboard or be left behind. Here are some points that Enterprise Social Networking can do for IT.
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!!
I can see this working but not solved by another user but instead by using the others experience described on the support page, just as a user knowledge base or maybe providing access to another printing resources. As a result of analyzing previous incidents and posting solutions or workarounds for the others to use.
Great article! I would love to dialogue more about this Maff Rigby. I find the path you are on most interesting. I will need to digest what you wrote before further commenting. I don’t think the Service Desk is going away, and I think collaboration is the future. I blogged about this. http://hub.cherwell.com/blog/bid/90285/The-ITSM-Shift-Toward-Collaboration Let me respond in more detailed after I reading your entry.