If You Invented Distributed Computing Today, Would You Keep the Support Model?
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Bad Habits Die Hard
Something struck me the other day as I was speaking at a Gartner conference. In all the talks I give about the benefits of proactive IT – from financial savings, speed, and quality of service – I’m still always surprised how much convincing needs to be done on the benefits of proactivity.
We’ve been doing IT wrong since the beginning.
And because we’ve been doing IT wrong for so long, it’s hard to see a different way forward. It came up on the DEX Show podcast recently, with a great guest who commented that it’s tough to break bad IT habits that have been decades in the making.
What If?
Through no fault of our own, we decided over the years the best way to fix tech problems is to focus on what employees tell us is wrong, and make sure we’re super responsive to those needs. In an unforgettable exchange with my prior CEO at the time, our team said “Liam, we don’t know they have issues unless they call us.” That set off a journey to proactive IT that changed our operational model forever.
“Fast responses with low MTTR!” that’s always been the goal (in IT support). But inherent in that goal is a flawed design that’s dependent on responding and reacting to employee calls for help when technology problems impact them.
It’s fine to serve the business as quickly as possible and fix what’s broken, but what if end-user and distributed computing was invented today? Would we still quietly accept the fact that IT depends on employees to catch errors and report them, knowing there are DEX solutions on the market?
Imagine Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the innovators at IBM never developed the PC, Windows, or the Mac. Instead, all computing during the last 40 years has been done from large data centers and clunky terminals. And then in 2023, someone introduces a new computing environment, called Distributed Computing. A market explodes with different devices, operating systems, apps, even cloud services. It’s a beautiful design; modern, efficient, and primed to improve productivity.
There’s only one catch: the support model will be exactly the same as it is today.
So, if employees encounter technology problems, they’ll have to do the following:
- Contact something called “The Help Desk”, where they can get specialized service from a new group of employees hired just for this purpose. Dozens of “Help Desk Reps” will take calls and fix things we don’t know about. Surely every employee will want to call if they have problems. After all, who better to know if things aren’t working than the employees themselves?
- If this Help Desk can’t solve the problem, we’ve designed an additional group with higher skilled technicians at what we call “Level Two”, and we expect about 30% of all calls to go to this group where most issues will be fixed.
- And lastly, if L2 can’t solve the problem, we have an organizational design which includes some of the highest skilled engineers who designed this system and will be available for the really difficult problems. And if they can’t solve it, they will escalate to the vendor.
- We’ll also have an operational group who will use the incoming tickets for trend analysis so we can tell if there are bigger issues. We’ll call this “Problem Management”, and it will work great since we’ll have all the tickets from our employees already in the system.
It’s perfect, right?!
IT’s Flawed Design Model:
It’s absurd to depend on employees to tell IT what’s broken, especially when IT probably broke those things in the first place.
And it’s even more absurd to think that a group of generalists at a Help Desk will be able to
offer any substantial help.
Why does IT still operate under this design?
Here’s a list of the inherent problems with this logic, and there are many:
- Employees have a job to do, and yes, an IT issue is disruptive to their work. But so is the effort to call and get the problem fixed. And analysts and surveys show that only about half of employees will actually call in their issue and opt instead to “just live with it”. Employee
productivity is impacted by both problems which are separate and distinct issues and should be measured separately. - EUC teams depend on that employee’s phone call in order to identify and fix what’s broken, which sounds absurd no matter how you spin it. Employees have to stop what they’re doing to call and tell you about a problem that you probably caused. And if the employee doesn’t call, IT can now blame the business for not telling us about the problem. But the company can’t possibly require everyone to call in every issue – they can’t afford to handle a ticket volume that would double. After all, we’re trying to REDUCE tickets!
- Only half of employees call in their issues. If you’re doing problem management and root cause removal (RCR) based on information found in tickets, your baseline data is already 50% inaccurate.
- With SaaS or other cloud-based services, your employees are your only lifeline to understanding availability and performance of your suppliers. Either they tell you, or the vendor does. Is either one of those options really ideal?
A Smarter Way
It’s obviously a bad design, so why do we continue to live with it?
Why is it so difficult to change? Does better service with higher quality and speed really need complex ROI studies? Do we really feel it’s better / cheaper / faster to continue to operate the same way we did 40 years ago?
Of course not.
Reactive IT can be solved. The first step is admitting that the current way of operating
doesn’t scale anymore, and the technology exists to become proactive for the
benefit of the business, its employees, and the IT teams that manage it all.
In my prior enterprise IT role, my colleagues and I solved this problem with the only solution that was purpose-built for proactive IT and DEX. We had every tool under the sun: The VDI
one, the APM one, the SCCM snap-on, but none of them could reverse the employee dependency that’s built in to just about every IT department today.
We were able to:
- See what’s failing in our existing environments, and what could fail before it’s deployed.
- Understand the full scope of a deployment and its impact in real-time, allowing projects to move more quickly.
- See true application adoption and utilization, removing unnecessary apps and right-sizing licenses.
- Get feedback and sentiment from employees, allowing IT to get
closer to the business. - Avoid or resolve all those technology issues that employees never call about, which account for about 50% more disruption than IT knows about today.
- Improve employee sentiment about their company and IT specifically.
- Understand health and utilization of devices and refresh based on need versus fear of failure.
- Measure and track Green IT initiatives, carbon footprint, and general digital waste.
- Significantly reduce both reactive ticket volumes and the MTTR of remaining tickets with deep analysis, AI recommendations, and automation.
Don’t believe me? Schedule a short demo of
Nexthink Infinity today.
