External Support - Solution to Many Problems in a Company
Content
The IT market is empty. And when you finally put a team together, there still comes the time when they are gone – during vacation or sick leave.
How do you fight with that? The samme way we have dealt with accounting or taxes – we obtain services from a company that secures it. At times when we need to close the books or do the taxes, they just provide us with a service.
Many commpanies have already learned to use services – for example the XaaS or the Internet. When it comes to human capital, the attitude is not always so open as when it comes to applications. Companies tend to have a feeling that they have to have an in-house team and that is that.
But today’s IT faces not only the outages in job positions for various reasons but also overload of routine or high demand for specialization within the tens of various technologies. And the situation is not getting better in the long-term which is why we focus today on how companies can efficiently operate their IT department thanks to the external support services.
Problems the IT Faces
insufficient number of professionals on the market
Same old story – IT professionals are missing. And those that are there are held with extreme force not to leave their current company. So we are in a very uncomfortable situation – the market is stagnant but the needs are increasing. Besides the number of technologies is not just growing in the high-tech areas but it is growing through the mmore traditional industries so there is just no way of escape.
Outages and substitutability
An IT person is not a superhuman even though his knowledge sometimes resembles one. Even IT workers, surprisingly, need time for vacation and time to deal with a sickness. But their work still has to be done because a company just cannot do without someone being available to fix things. And since digital technologies and devices are an inseperable part of any work, these outages can be considered critical because they would influence the ability of a company to function properly.
routine avalanche
A printer is not working, updates are stuck, a computer froze… The current situation in companies is such that IT specialists devote their precious time to resolving common technical problems. For example those you see in the beginning of this paragraph. In the end, a professional that should work on product development or special functionalities, ends up as a regular technician – on the phone, taking tickets.
This inefficiency of human resource use is then shown in the internal operations and the approach to customers. And your technician will not thank you for being on the phone 24/7.
high specialization demands
Long gone are the times when an IT guy was able to manage everything what was even vaguely related to IT. Today’s development on the physical, virtual and application levels is speeding forward and this just made the renaissance person obsolete. To cover the global needs of companies and individuals, the development is on such a scale that simply requires specialization.
But the word has changed its meaning over time. It does not simply mean – I know how to operate Microsoft Office. We now talk about database systems or whole environmment architecture. Given the high complexity of such solutions, it is not possible for an IT person to manage being a specialist in majority of them.
24/7
For a customer, this is a great hing, for the tech team, this is a nightmare. Working 24/7 is in certain areas an unthinkable part of service quality. But to maintain a team like that is very costly and it is necessary to think if the activities are on such a scale for an internal team to be viable.
Support to the Rescue
Not to just stick to the negative scenarios, let’s look at a solution that can help with any of the abovemmentioned problems or a combination of them. And even with all of them at once. External support can be divided into 3 basic service types – helpdesk, monitoring and outsourcing.
Reactive activity – Based on an input, the team reacts. For example, a telefone rings and a person needs help with system updates.
Proactive activity – The team reacts first to an alert coming from the customer system. For example, there is a power outage during midnight and the technicians immediately help preventing problems.
Helpdesk
Call centers are well known but it is usually a negative context in which we encounter them – someone is trying to sell to us something over the phone. But in IT, call centers are an inseparable part of customer care. Based on a level of complexity, we can discern 4 categories.
L0 – regular call center – jotting down the request into a system
L1 – technical call center – helping the customer over the phone how to resolve the problem
L2 – technical call center – the technician arrives personally or via a remote desktop to resolve the issue
L3 – technical call center – issues requiring specialists
These categories will vary from provider to provider but we have worked out this overview becuase we felt it was the best way to categorize individual activities based on their difficulty, resources and solution legth. Besides there are also helpdesk activities that include processes set-up – how to handle requests.
It is not about hiring people for your IT team that would just communicate externally. Helpdesk is a reactive form of support when the L(X) team waits fro a question from the customer. And the team looks like your team so your customer never have to know they aren’t actually your employees.
L0-L3 is not SLA – These words are very often interchanged and put on the same level – but it is an apple-orange situation. The L(X) levels of helpdesk are related to the level of difficulty of the help, SLA (Service Level Agreement) is the availability level of the specific service. It is given in percentages and it simply states:”Of you have purchased the SLA level of XX.X%, for that percent of time the provider is bound to provide you the service with high quality.”
In which cases can helpdesk be useful? We have a few examples for you but these is definitely not an exhaustive list:
- you need customer support 24/7
- a team of IT specialists needs to get some burden off of their workload and get rid of routinne tasks
- the market doesn’t offer a specialist for a specific solution that could resolve issues with a specific technology
We have a case study from you – covering the instance of Konica Minolta Czech – you can read it here.
Monitoring
As the name suggests, monitoring is monitoring. It does sound horrible but in reality a monitoring center is avaialble to check on the state of tech systems – like IoT devices or IT environment.
A team of technicians sits by an application that checks the system 24/7 and they immediately react if the system shows any alerts or warnings. These don’t have to be set just for a state of complete catastrophy, the monitoring system can be set specifically to your needs. For example it can monitor states that are divided by a specific scale and based on which scale includes the alert, the team acts based on a set-up process.
Outsourcing
If you want to stick to the boxes of support services that do not overlap, then outsourcing is the provision of specific IT duties by an external team. Most often it comes in the form of physical infrastructure care but you can also outsource the virtual one.
Support is a must from the company that provides you with external team. And here we circle back to helpdesk. What is the difference? With oursourcing you receive helpdesk for your own needs. If you have a call center as a service, then helpdesk is there for your customers.
Efficiency Externally Is Possible
An efficient IT team is no longer only about an internal team. Your operations can be combines with external services like helpdesk, monitoring and outsourcing for a company not to suffer from limited number of professionals on the market, their overload or time out of work.
