Despite anyone’s best efforts, IT customers will always have questions or need something, and IT systems will always run into issues. As an IT organization grows, there comes a time when the volume of calls for help becomes large enough to necessitate establishing a formal help desk with the goal of simply answering customer inquiries to prevent them from calling technical resources directly. In this environment, help desk analysts often take on heroic proportions merely by answering complaints and fixing IT things that break.

But there are a few troubling aspects to this.

1. Based upon the kinds of repetitive calls the analysts field, they develop a “tribal” knowledge that lives only in their heads of how to satisfy the needs of the customer.
2. One analyst’s “solution” might be different from another’s.
3. The “solution” might not ultimately be the correct one or follow the proper process.

The result is little to no standardization or documentation because every analyst is focused on, and praised for, being a hero.

The superhero help desk scenario would probably land the IT organization somewhere below a level 1.5 on TransAccel Group’s Maturity Model. While this kind of hero-driven help desk might seem effective in the short term, it can’t possibly scale to meet the challenges of increased business demand, more complexity or greater economic pressures (costs). In order to meet those challenges, a help desk needs to transform itself into a service desk and banish the hero mentality!

Transforming from operating as a help desk to a service desk means shifting from being individual-centric and ad hoc to business-centric and strategic; from relying upon tribal knowledge to leveraging a knowledge-base of standard solutions; from being a self-made jack-of-all-trades to being a professional who knows how to get issues resolved; and from minimizing customer “noise” to measuring customer satisfaction.

While it sounds like common sense, it will take discipline and rigor to implement. The discipline comes in the form of program and project management, and the rigor in the form of a standards-based framework (we recommend ITIL) coupled with an ongoing measurement and analytics function. Once implemented, your service desk analysts will have tools at their disposal in the form of checklists, decision trees, and a comprehensive knowledge base to ensure that either a customer’s question is answered or the issue is routed to the proper person to resolve. Once the transformation is complete, IT maturity will move closer to level 2.5.

The same can be said about an IT organization’s approach to cost optimization. After years of one-off tactical cost cutting, many businesses are facing the challenge of ongoing and continuous cost optimization. For many, this is no longer the exception but the new reality.

The usual approach to cutting costs is the purely tactical. Problem is, when the clear cost culprits have been identified and reduced or eliminated, future optimization initiatives can become more arbitrary and problematic. Even the low-hanging fruit that appears to be an obvious candidate for reduction to some may not be to others—like your business clients.

In a recent Gartner survey, CIO’s were asked, “What are the main barriers preventing organizations from achieving continuous optimization of IT costs?” Sixty-five percent of the respondents indicated that it was a matter of mindset—that is, creating the environment necessary for all resources to work together, move in the same direction, and agree on the same strategy.

We agree. TransAccel believes there’s a better approach to determining cost optimization decisions—one based on four “Guiding-Principles.” The benefits of using this method include a more consistent alignment with the company’s strategic drivers, a consensus among business leaders, a long-term framework for ongoing cost optimization initiatives, and a correct way to maintain what is most important to the organization.

The Four Principles are:

1. Transparency – IT and business leaders need to explicitly agree on what IT provides the business, and what the business needs from IT. Often, basic cost optimization practices lack quantitative data to define consumption, drivers, and inhibitors for IT and business services. Transparency provides different viewpoints of IT spending, allowing for better consensus and agreement regarding opportunities for optimization and prioritization.
2. Flexibility – Maintaining a prudent balance between both internal and external resources allows an organization to remove or add resources as the business climate changes. Sourcing IT on a variable basis is a good strategy for continual optimization.
3. Simplification – Running IT systems on standardized platforms leads to consistent business processes and well-defined IT services, which reduce costs. In highly complex environments, IT unit costs can be as much as 25% higher.
4. Discipline – In order to maintain constant focus and vigilance on cost optimization initiatives, an accountable and proactive owner should be delegated (normally the CIO), who will utilize dashboards and metrics to measure success rather than wait for cost targets to be handed down from top management. Additionally, establishing an optimization team that includes leaders from outside IT to help weigh business outcomes and constraints is another option worth considering.

In later blogs, we will explore some of these important principles in more detail. However, the four above are critical if a continuous and effective cost optimization environment is going to exist.

The goal is to manage IT as a business, and to leave all the laughs to Groucho Marx.