Greater coordination and cooperation between departments could greatly improve an organisation’s productivity. Even though this kind of collaboration isn’t always easy, it fosters organisational stability.
While organisations comprise of many departments, the IT department is the driving force and maintaining a stable IT department is a key objective for any organisation.
IT management is supported by two major domains: IT services and IT operations. The ultimate goal of IT services is to design, manage, deliver, and improve information technologies that are used within the organisation, while IT operations deal with the administrative side of things.
>See also: Automate, innovate, learn: the path for IT service providers and buyers
IT operations handle individual application requirements, manage storage and networking, and troubleshoot users’ devices to resolve issues. Organisations employ a help desk solution for their IT services needs and a desktop management solution for their IT operations needs.
Most organisations rely on IT departments for their day-to-day routines, with system administrators and technicians contributing to 24/7 IT support. But how an IT department implements their IT services and IT operations can be just as important in determining the quality of their IT support.
Understanding how these two domains influence end user support requires deeper consideration into why IT departments require a help desk solution and a desktop management solution in the first place.
1. Helps ticket management
Most organisations provide almost all of their employees with a work laptop. That means whenever a user faces an issue with their company laptop, they raise a ticket with their IT department. A technician then deals with the ticket one step at a time, escalating the request as necessary until the issue is resolved.
Raising requests may not seem alarming initially, but as organisations grow and technicians’ inboxes pile up with tickets, support requests may become a matter of concern.
>See also: Worldwide IT spending forecast to grow in 2017 – Gartner
Given that help desk software can completely facilitate ticket handling for your technicians, you can imagine how hard it would be to handle those tickets without all the automation a help desk provides.
The IT services team can employ a help desk solution to help them handle problem management, change management, incident management, IT project management, and a huge set of asset management and automation needs as well.
2. Helps manage assets and address vulnerabilities
On top of a help desk, most organisations also need a desktop management solution to accomplish other IT operations like software deployment, patch management, asset management, mobile device management, and remote control operations.
When vulnerabilities aren’t addressed in time, they can turn into a gateway for hackers to breach your enterprise systems and tap into confidential information.
This can be avoided with proper patch management across heterogeneous platforms. Apart from this, software deployment and troubleshooting remote computers is again handled with the help of a desktop management solution.
>See also: 5 reasons why IT service management is essential
IT services and IT operations play a major role in IT management, but the overall efficiency of your IT management truly increases when they are integrated.
3. Helps avoid problems with IT silos
Consider a scenario where an employee raises a request for new software: A user request generates a ticket that is sent to a help desk technician; the help desk technician reads the ticket and understands the requirement; the technician forwards the request to the right individual (in this case, the system administrator) for proper handling; the system administrator installs the software for the user; after installing the software successfully, the system administrator updates the status of the ticket and sends it back to the technician; the help desk technician closes the ticket.
Each step of this lengthy workflow is performed one after the other continuously, providing the help desk technician and the system administrator are available at all times. If either of them aren’t fully available, the process of installing software for the end user and closing the ticket quickly becomes more time consuming.
4. Work better together
Consider the same scenario where an employee requests new software. However, in this case, the organisation has integrated their help desk and desktop management tools: A user request generates a ticket that is sent to a help desk technician; the help desk technician reads the ticket and understands the requirement; the technician selects the requested software from a list of available software packages and deploys the software to the user’s computer; once the installation finishes, the technician closes the ticket.
>See also: IT service transformation for Horizon nuclear power
The technician can easily access a list of available software packages because the organisation’s IT services are integrated with their IT operations. The overall workflow here is streamlined, taking much less time to process the end user’s request.
The scenario discussed above is just one example in which integrating your IT services and operations is beneficial. There are many other scenarios where the need to troubleshoot remotely, patch remote systems, manage mobile devices, etc., makes this integration even more critical.
Most of the leading help desk and desktop management solutions in the market offer some sort of integration. Start integrating your help desk and desktop management solutions to increase the efficiency of your IT operations and services now.
Sourced by Giridhara Raam, product analyst at ManageEngine
The UK’s largest conference for tech leadership, TechLeaders Summit, returns on 14 September with 40+ top execs signed up to speak about the challenges and opportunities surrounding the most disruptive innovations facing the enterprise today. Secure your place at this prestigious summit by registering here
