While these core systems are essential for recording and managing transactions, 80 per cent of those questioned claim that legacy tech is making it difficult to introduce new products.  55 per cent of banks plan to develop their existing client bases, compared to the 20 per cent focused on customer acquisition, but a lack of visibility of processes and an inability to innovate are making it difficult to create services which ‘wow’ customers.

“Core banking systems are at the heart of any bank’s activity, and adoption of modern systems should be reflected in the bank’s strategy to stay competitive,” says Finicle global head Haragopal Manglpudl.

As previously reported by ServiceDesk360, BYOD policies are causing headaches for IT staff.  Describing the cultural change which much take place to manage this problem as ‘managed diversity’, analyst Gartner says that a flexible approach is needed to respond to the growing importance of smartphone and tablet use in the workplace.  Failure to adapt will see a fall in user productivity and the growing perception that IT is no longer relevant to the working realities faced by business users.

The analyst also calls for service desks to collaborate with other parts of IT to ensure that BYOD doesn’t cause infrastructure problems.  “Because of the complexity of the mobile device landscape, there must be a person or group responsible for monitoring this landscape, and for understanding users’ demands for new types of device and the impact that new platforms have on applications.  This person or group must work with the security team regularly to address the impact that platform changes and demands for mobile services have on the organisation’s security,” says Terrence Cosgrove, research director.

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Social IT is all about breaking down the barriers that exist between IT and the rest of the business, bringing the two areas together towards a much closer way of working. By engaging with our customers in this manner, we can understand their needs better and offer a service that is specifically tailored to meet these needs.

The nature of social IT means that IT will lose some of its control over the support experience, and this may cause concern for some. However, the reality is that this control was lost a while back, and many IT users already seek support through alternative channels (they ask colleagues for help, search Google, or post their question in their social network of choice) – these users will come to the service desk as a last resort. By recognising this and enhancing the support process through the addition of a social IT environment, IT may win back some of those users that have lost faith.

By studying how social media platforms work and how the people using those platforms behave both individually and as a collective, I’ve highlighted seven concepts that define social IT support you must accept before you can proceed.

1) Social IT is open and transparent
The majority of information that people share within the social environment is visible and viewable by everyone else in that environment – the fewer restrictions you place on the visibility of information, the richer the social experience will be. However, users of the social IT environment should be in full control of their own privacy settings, so they can decide who sees the information they share. The more options available to them for controlling their security, the more comfortable they will be with interacting, and the experience will be much more rewarding for everyone involved. For example, users should be able to share private information through direct messaging to a single recipient (e.g. direct messages in Twitter) or to a select sub-group of people (e.g. posting a comment in a private group in Facebook).

2) There is no differentiation between agent and customer
All users of the social IT environment are created equal, with no role-related privileges or access rights. Again, the person submitting information to the environment decides who can see and interact with that information.

3) Anyone can contribute to any item
Anyone within the social IT environment can contribute their knowledge to any item raised within it. This could be in the form of answering a question, taking ownership of an incident, or engaging in a discussion. Their social reputation and influence will increase or decrease depending on the quality of these interactions, and will be decided by the user community.  A clever organisation will take note of an employee’s contributions within the social IT environment, and find a way to reward them where appropriate.

4) Customers can help each other
Following on from point 3, social IT enables customers to help each other. Whether it’s your internal IT customers or your external customers, social IT utilises the concepts of crowd-sourcing to capture and exploit the knowledge that exists within these customer communities.

5) All information is captured and stored
Social interactions generate an enormous amount of information which goes beyond the obvious transactional data. They record what mood you’re in, your location, who you’re with, even what you had for breakfast. Once captured, this information should be analysed to discover trends that help us understand our customers and improve our IT services.

6) Knowledge sharing is implicit
Knowledge sharing is what creates a social experience. Whether that knowledge is a photo, a video, a link to an article – people share knowledge with each other on a continual basis. Social IT should enable people to constantly share knowledge in a simple and intuitive manner.

7) The customer is at the centre
While traditional IT service management has heavily focussed on theory, process and governance, social IT places the customer at the centre of the IT support experience. Social IT focuses on providing an excellent user experience through the use of intuitive technology and communicating with customers through the channels that suit them.

Social IT continues to be a much debated topic, and as always I welcome your feedback and thoughts. In the true spirit of social IT, please be honest, open and respectful – there won’t be any repercussions for any negative comments, and by contributing your knowledge you can help to shape this interesting and powerful movement.  I will be continuing to write about this issue on ServiceDesk360, with the third in this series coming soon, please let me know if there are particular aspects that you’d like me to focus on.

Maff Rigby is the founder of IT SmartDesk.

The research indicates that technology is developing at a such a fast pace that IT departments are falling behind in fundamentals such as safely connecting to networks, with more than half of those questioned admitting to not having a security strategy for mobile devices in place.

“The days of provisioning and maintaining a single computing platform, locking down work environments and mandating productivity systems are dead,” says LANDesk vice-president Steve Workman.

LANDesk has produced an infographic detailing more of its study of BYOD IT support.

I’m grateful to an attendee of one of my support management training seminars for the title of this piece.  It highlights a repeated support problem.

I’ve been giving a lot of those seminars recently.  I’m doing another in June (fully booked) and another in July (details at the end of this article).  One question that always comes up, and I expect it will be raised in those too, is what you do as a servicedesk manager, if the other departments in IT do not react with expected alacrity to the support calls you allocate to them.  The second- and pointlessly named third-line departments who refuse to offer an estimate as to when they will resolve that escalated assignment, the refusal to speak to the user, the tendency to put their own priorities before those of the technically-impeded user, the repeated failure to complete the call documentation to a standard that provides information that will historically be more useful than the single word “fixed”, or the well-meaning but useless “fixed, customer happy ok”.  It seems a ubiquitous problem, appearing in public and private sector, small and large organisations.  Actually, the reasons it happens (or the excuses given) usually differ with the size of organisation, but the effect is the same.

Incident manager? No thanks

So what should you do if it’s happening in your organisation?  Here’s what you shouldn’t do – you shouldn’t implement the incredibly naïve and organisationally immature recommendation of ITIL, namely to appoint an ‘incident manager’.  At least not unless that appointee as an individual has, and will happily use, the power to fire or at least confidently censure, anybody below the rank of CIO.  That’s the first requirement of that authority.  The second is that the incident manager must be utterly dogged and persistent in his or her pursuit of offending departments and individuals.  Am I overstating it a bit?  No, I am not.  Because that is what it will take.

The paradox is, that it is only because of the glaring anachronisms and flaws in ITIL that would make it look like an incident manager is necessary.  In an organisation where professionalism takes precedence over everything else, the incident manager would be superfluous.  The converse of that is, of course, that if you think you need an incident manager, then somewhere in your map of resolving agencies, professionalism can be called into question.

This perennial problem makes my blood boil.  As a servicedesk manager, you have a right to expect a service from those ‘resolving agencies’, but if it doesn’t come, all you can do is complain to higher ranks.  If the responsibility is genuinely theirs but they do nothing about it, and offer you no explanation for that decision, then the end of my previous paragraph may apply.

Delegation

You have been told by those above, or by de facto practice, or because ITIL says so, that if a call comes in of a content that is by design outwith your service desk’s area of expertise, then you shall send it to the IT department that owns that expertise.  It is then perfectly reasonable to expect an appropriate response and action from that delegation.  But it doesn’t stop there.  If that is your instruction, then it is safe to assume that by the same token, the delegate department in question has been told to expect support calls.  Therefore, it would be professional and right of them to create internal procedures for handling those calls.  But then, it doesn’t stop there either.  Because it also means that the resolving agency also counts a proportion of their budget as funding the resource to deal with those calls.  Put simply, not having a process to deal with requests is merely amateurish – but taking corporate finance to fund a service and then not providing it, could be construed as actually dishonest.

When I was a career helpdesk manager, my patience with departments who would not deal with servicedesk calls just because they didn’t feel like it, was rather limited.  Nowadays, I’m more even tempered.  It might just be bad management – there is a lot of it in IT, as technicians are promoted beyond their level of comprehension and don’t grasp the concept of ‘management’ sufficiently well, to realise that it imposes on them the responsibility to design mechanisms and deploy resources to demand.  More often than not, the reason why second and third line departments are unresponsive to support calls contains more than an element of that lack of understanding.  But it’s safe to say that it is often also to do with the attitude of some second liners that they have been promoted somehow beyond the necessity for support work, so they see it as beneath them.  But then that too is a man-management problem that their head of department should have recognised and dealt with.

Sharston Baths

When I was a kid in South Manchester, like so many nippers in the area, I’d often get wet at Sharston Baths on a Saturday morning.  The designers specified Sharston’s pool to be ‘Olympic-sized’ – but forgot to allow for the width of the tiling.  The pool ended up just that bit too short for competitive swimming – so it never reached its design goal.  They knocked the building down in the 1990s.

Bless ITIL.  It came up with the idea of ‘IT services’ to distinguish the function from ‘development’.  Great idea, but just like Sharston Baths, they didn’t go far enough.  They could have designed-in end-to-end user support, but instead, they allowed for some services to be delivered under subcontract by parts of IT that were outside the influence of IT services.  It was a problem that could have been solved by a ‘framework’ such as ITIL, but all they did was document common practice in 1980′s mainframe data processing departments and because of the installed base, they’ve never had the bottle to recommend a better way.

Of course departments that are involved in the design and creation of IT systems like business applications and networks, will prioritise that function over support calls.  This pestering by the servicedesk is an interruption to them, a misdirection from their key function.  Which is more important?  New systems development to keep the corporation abreast of its customers’ and masters’ demands, or restoring productivity to users impeded right now by a present IT failure?  The two sides of IT will argue differently.  I’m in user support, so I say present productivity puts food on the table today, so that comes first.

Radical

The ultimate fix to this problem is a radical shift in the design of IT, which I’ll be writing about soon.  There is, however, scope for an interim fix – but you will need a basis of decision that goes beyond and takes precedence over the internecine politics of various IT factions.  For me, that decision basis is the financial value of the productivity lost while a support call remains outstanding.  This is far more powerful than a mere statement of how long it takes to fix a call.  You can calculate the productivity as the corporation’s annual turnover divided by the aggregate hours worked by its employees over the same period, then portioned down by a factor describing the overall average dependence on IT.  Multiply that pound figure by the number of hours the call remained open for – then represent that in a table comparing all the resolving agencies’ performance, including the servicedesk.

£Millions

As you will see from that table, the company productivity lost by resolvers “not getting round” to fixing calls will probably run into millions of pounds.  Now there’s a report that will get read at board level – but don’t send it there first.  Show it to your immediate boss.  Now you can ask for service improvements from the other departments.

Don’t be scared to fight for better service for the users.  They are holding you responsible for the poor service.  So they should, ITIL also says it’s down to you (ITIL’s wrong about that too, by the way).  The users don’t know, nor do they care that the slowness is because of other parts of IT.  So if you’re being held accountable, it is your right to find a way to influence the quality of service from those parts of IT to which you subcontract part of your workload.  Make no mistake about this, anybody to whom you insource work – be it networks, development, whoever – when it comes to user support that department works for you.  Behave like it’s true, because it is.  They are your resources, no matter how many grades higher may be their job than yours, no matter how much closer to the front door than you they are allowed to park their car.  And because management is about the orchestration of resources – manage them.  It is your right and duty.

Noel Bruton is a UK-based consultant and trainer, who assists organizations in a wide range of industries in the practicalities of IT support management and improvement. He is the author of best-selling books on all aspects of IT support service delivery. See more on this topic and others at his website, www.noelbruton.com. 

His next one day workshop, called Moving From IT Technician to Manager: a one-day mindset-&-practice breakthrough workshop, runs in central London on Wednesday 4th July 2012, 1000-1600.

Its purpose is twofold; to provide the promoted technician with the new philosophies and priorities necessary for management; and to describe, in some detail, the specific tasks of the manager’s working day.  Click the link above to learn more and book your place.

The SDITS show is a special event.  I did a write-up for ServiceDesk360 after the Pink conference in Vegas earlier this year, and now, resting my aching feet in a bowl of warm water, I’m reflecting on the SDITS experience.  A personal view from a vendor, obviously.  Your experience may differ, but this was mine.

Unlike the Pink conference, SDITS is predominantly an industry/vendor show case, but has a very high standard of seminars, roundtables, debates and briefings running alongside.  My thanks to those who attended the sessions I was involved in.  These presentations and seminar sessions run in parallel all day, but are quite literally the side-shows around the show floor: the main event housing 70 exhibitor stands.  And the crowds were great.  The big stands were packed, overflowing into the aisles, drawing in more people craning to see what’s so exciting.  It’s an amazing thing to see the interest and enthusiasm in such large numbers.  We regularly counted well over 100 visitors on (and overflowing over) our stand for the big presentations.

Many people commented that all the stands looked outstanding this year.  Walking into the show felt like walking into a giants’ kitchen design showroom, with crisp clean pods, bars, stools and worktops.  (Mind you, you can maybe have too much white).

It wasn’t always like this.  There was a time many years back when HITS (as it was known then) was caught in the post-90s pinstripe-suited and braces old style software sales model, where the vendors tried to outdo each other by having the wackiest, zaniest entertainment.  Sadly – I blush – we had an ice rink one year, the Blues Brothers (damn they were loud), and the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.  All the vendors were entertainers.  Then we decided that if ITSM was to be taken seriously, by serious people, we needed to stop being zany and start to present ourselves for serious business.  So we donned business suits.  And now look at the place.  No ‘corporate’ polo shirts, no gimmicks, no comedy.  Smart wear, serious conversations, and increasingly valuable opportunities to share and learn.  Analysts and consultants mixing with vendors and meeting with IT service practitioners.

The hot subjects of the SDITS show were pretty clear.  Mobile, consumerisation, and its scary outcome, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), ruled.  Another interesting perspective was that close to 100 per cent of the conversations I had included self-service.  That’s an interesting change from a few years ago where it was a ‘nice to have’, aspirational objective.  Now everything starts with self-service and works back.  That’s brilliant – to me that’s consumerisation in action folks.  It shows the rising need to match the IT customer’s consumer-standard expectations, and shows the growing recognition of the customer above the IT.

Social?  Well SDITS was very social, very Twitter, very Back2ITSM.  I think, for me, Pink ‘11 got that whole ITSM online social community thing going, and last year’s SDITS kind of tried, but it didn’t quite fly.  But this year, we had a great level of continual commentary, dialogue and critique from individuals at the show and worldwide that were all part of the conversation.  It was great to see some tweets coming out from sessions that I couldn’t attend, showing that the attendees were brave enough to stand up and question some of the currently forecasted futures for IT.  Debate raged, and that to me, is a very good thing.

Anyway, so the stands change, the subjects change, but many faces are familiar.  Rumours abound, gossip, information sharing.  It’s a rare chance to see so many of the analysts, commentators and most familiar names in the ITSM and #Back2ITSM universe in one place, roaming freely.  A bit like an ITSM safari – “Look, there’s a @jimbofin!  I hear you can spot a @stephenmann over by the waterhole!  Look – there’s a @barclayrae coming over the hill’.

But then did anyone go down to Infosec?  The show next door and downstairs?  Three times the floor size and way more stands, yet very different.  SDITS is business, Infosec is technology.  Mind you, they did have a giant space invaders game, and I think I saw Roy Walker (of Catchphrase) presenting on one small stand.  ”Just say what you see”… “erm, is it GEEK Roy?”

Then it was back upstairs to the pristine white business fairground where ITSM is as close to rock and roll as it’ll ever get.  Credit where credit’s due.  The new organiser, Diversified, has got its act together.  Smooth and seamless.  SDI and Ovum both played a great supporting act.  And the coffee on our stand was – as usual – outstanding.

And then, just like that, at the end of the last day it was over.  Nothing but exhausted vendors staring blankly at mounds of contact sheets, presenters massaging their aching throats, and empty SDI ‘hug’ boxes blowing like tumbleweed through the aisles.  And then the stands were packed up and gone again for another year, leaving nothing but the echo of a distant sound…. ‘win an ipad2, win a kindle fire, mobile, catalogue, BYOD….’

I’ve been attending SDITS in its various incarnations for over ten years, long enough to remember the Touchpaper ice rink (yes really) and the live Blues Brothers performances on the FrontRange stand (yes really).  Many of these events have blurred over the years, primarily because (whisper it quietly) not much changed in the industry.  It may have been – and continue to be – an important entity within an IT support context, but talking about ITIL was never going to give you goose bumps was it?

I am therefore pleased to state with honesty that day one of SDITS12 was the best time I’ve ever had at the show.  The atmosphere was cracking from the moment the breakfast briefing started at 0830, with the early morning debate encompassing the future of the service desk, social media and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

Starting on a such a high, a drop-off was to be expected, but the buzz continued and remained there for the whole day.  (James Finister echoed this sentiment to me late on day two, stating that previously the show started with a burst of optimistic enthusiasm which began to tail off after lunch, yet this year it maintained its pitch).  The feeling was certainly helped by a knock-out session by Chris Dancy, which referenced the Matrix, Terminator, Smoking 2.0 (“I used to be a smoker, now I pretend to check my phone when I want five minutes peace”), and a series of stunning figures and observations which explained why the current explosion in technology adoption is just the beginning, and that the integration between humans and IT will utterly transform the working reality of all of us.  It’s a great session (Cloud, Mobility and the Coming Singularity) if you ever get to see Chris deliver it live.  I could sense half the audience thinking: ‘what’s this got to do with me’, and the other half beginning to panic as the enormity of what Chris explained hit them.

Next for me was conversation with the always engaging Kevin Kimber, UK country manager for ServiceNow, who explained that ITSM teams attempting to improve the end user experience should be aiming much higher - citing Amazon as setting the bar that must be met if internal IT departments are to remain relevant.

The conversations I had continued in the same vein, with those I spoke to keen to solve real world challenges, rather than the internally-obsessed ‘how do we improve this ITIL process’ talks I had become accustomed to.  The day culminated with the Back2ITSM presentation, which showcased the launch of the initiative’s official website and introduced to the show audience its very difficult but worthy task of extracting from the industry the very best ideas and methods for solving ITSM challenges.  Like everything that proceeded it, Back2ITSM is a breath of fresh air, a chance to re-evaluate the sources of ‘best practice’ we reference and create something more in keeping with the demands placed on IT today.

I left SDITS12 with belief that the industry really had began to change.  The imperative of thinking about IT from the perspective of the customer seemed at this moment to finally have sunk in.

You may have noticed I stated earlier that ‘day one’ was the best time I had a SDITS.  That wasn’t to say day two was bad – it wasn’t – but my mood was severely altered during the breakfast briefing.  Regardless of the original topic, the majority of sessions I attended over the two days of SDITS invariably turned to BYOD and social media, underlining the fact that these are the two areas causing practitioners the most concern.  The day two breakfast briefing was no exception, but for me represented the polar opposite of the progression mood I had witnessed during day one, with the willingness to experiment and find ways to adapt to emerging tech replaced by a sneering cynicism.  This was best illustrated by a comment about social media: “what are we supposed to do – ‘like‘ an incident?” which raised an appreciative laugh and in the process summed up why the service desk is in crisis.  The problem here is not questioning the value of social media in an IT support context  – such a question is healthy – it’s that too many IT professionals still think that social media is about posting what you ate for breakfast (I was fortunate enough to be sat next to Hornbill’s Pat Bolger, who offered a simple solution for protecting corporate matters while using Twitter to log IT incidents that impressed me enough to write it up as a news story.)

The luddite IT professionals again showed their true colours when talking about BYOD, questioning whether they should offer support for equipment procured by users.  This was the point that really fired me up.  When did the IT department become so arrogant that it dictated what technology people can use?  As I tweeted at the time, surely IT works for the end-users, and not the other way round?  At this moment I realised that for many organisations, all the talk of treating end-users like paying customers has been empty rhetoric.  I will be writing a follow up article on these topics soon.  A word of warning – if I’ve offended you so far, I suggest you studiously avoid this article.  I will call it “The article that will make the ITSM industry hate me” to give you a heads up.

Thankfully, Noel Bruton was on hand later that morning to put the BYOD issue into perspective.  Bruton is an individual that assess IT support issues based on logic, reasoning and metrics, and is not swayed by hype.  He freely admits that my working practices baffle him (he mentioned me during his presentation: “he is carrying a MacBook Air, iPad and iPhone – what’s the point?”) yet he argued that because consumersisation is a cultural, not a technological issue, service desks have no choice but to support a wider range of devices.  “We must get away from procedural rigidity and embrace governed flexibility, we’re dealing with creatives, not data entry people,” he said, explaining that service desks will have to price their support services accurately before they can adopt BYOD.  “Set an expectation, tell the users what you can support and if they demand more, explain that it will cost them.”

The day concluded with the recording of ITSMWP Rest of the World podcast, which was great fun to record, with the usual banter between some of the good and great in the ITSM world (even though I fear my rant – much of which has been outlined in this article – will jar once I listen back to it.)

In summary, SDITS12 was a fantastic event, well organised and thought-provoking.  It’s great to see the industry attempting to change finally.  Attitudes do however still need to change, because I fear that those who refuse to adapt are unlikely to be in the industry next year.  See you at SITS13 (yes, the D has been banished).

Back2ITSM has grown from the original idea by Forrester’s Stephen Mann that best practice content and thinking has traditionally been driven by what consultants and industry ‘experts’ think the industry needs, not necessarily what practitioners are really looking for.  ”As practitioners, we are consistently having to reinvent the wheel because of the absence of ‘shared practice’.  How many practitioners have created an incident prioritisation matrix or a capacity plan from scratch rather than leveraging a Blue Peter-like “here’s one we made earlier” example?,” explained Mann.

The presentation revealed the three topics which participants will be working on first; building a service catalogue; incident categorisation; and service desk metrics.  The audience broadly agreed with the choices, but when the presenters asked if anyone had any materials to add in, only one one came forward.  Eventually another audience member admitted to being constrained by their business which contractually owns any resources they create.

Stephen Mann recognised the difficulty of extracting material from businesses, but said that a number of large vendor organisations were beginning to see the value of sharing information through Back2ITSM to show their commitment to improving the industry and becoming though-leaders.  He is hopeful that the offering and use of initial content will breed both greater interest and the offering up of further content by practitioners and vendors alike.