Saturday Night & I Ain’t Got No Help Desk

By John Cosby

Computer Generated Solutions, Inc.

It’s Saturday night and you’re completing the big proposal that you and your staff have worked on all week. It must be in the customer’s office by noon on Monday. Arrangements have been made for your reproduction service to make copies on Sunday. As the final version is completed the network printer stops working. Just as you reach for the phone you realize “it’s Saturday night and I ain’t got no help desk.” Looking for someone to blame? You’re the one who ran the numbers and determined that after-hours staffing of the help desk and IT service department could not be justified. Now what?

You know many of your competitors as well as your vendors and customers are using outside companies to deliver all or part of their information technology (IT) services. Should you be outsourcing, too? Having some dependable help after hours seems like a great idea right now. Well, you’re not alone. According to the Gartner Group, a well-regarded IT analysis firm, “approximately 40% of Help Desks will have some form of outsourcing participation in 1998.”

Wrap-around services (after hours and weekend support provided by third parties) can enhance your IT customer service and your end user productivity at critical times. Many organizations cannot justify 7X24 (seven days/24 hours a day) staffing for IT Help Desk or service and support. Often, after hours work forces are too small to justify the expense. These evening and weekend employees still have problems and questions that can interfere with productivity. They’re working late for good reason and help after hours may be the most critical.

That’s where a “wrap around” help desk service comes in handy. Your in-house help desk provides service during business hours and the outside service covers after hours and weekends. Many companies start by contracting for support for a few hours before and after the “normal” workday and a half-day on Saturday. When your IT Help Desk goes offline for the evening the calls go to the wrap-around service provider. In many cases the fees for this service are based upon the number of calls serviced, thereby linking the cost to the amount of service required.

These wrap-around help desk services can also initiate onsite support when required. In addition to after hours support, call overflow can be handled by wrap-around service when help desk calls exceed the capacity of the in-house resources. This type of enhancement can truly raise the reputation of the IT Help Desk service and support staff.

Some executives feel that outsourcing their IT service is giving up control of their company to another firm. In reality, they are giving up a burden rather than giving up control. By focusing on core competencies, executives can determine which part of their IT services is core to their business and which activities are burdensome or distracting. For example, maintaining the custom database that supports your daily business transactions is critical to your company’s revenue stream. It may be best to have this supported by dedicated in-house staff. However, performing repairs on desktop PCs and providing routine file and print services to many users is probably not a core competency of your business and could be better served by an organization specializing in this service. As for control, executives find that they actually have more control over the service levels of a vendor than they do over internal resources. In fact, many companies who started with wrap-around support have eventually outsourced their entire Help Desk.

As you wait for someone to return your pager call, you remember that your network was supposed to be upgraded last month. What happened to that project? Oh, yes the resources were diverted to linking up the company that you acquired. Maybe one of those network projects should have been outsourced so that both could be completed on time.

Project oriented outsourcing can be very cost-effective as it enables a company to assemble a temporary work group that focuses effort only on the goals of the project. The work group may be staffed with experts specializing in the disciplines necessary to accomplish a complex installation, implementation, or upgrade. Often the cost of these highly skilled experts precludes permanent staffing. Outsourcing is an excellent way to attract the necessary talent for only the time required to complete your project.

In some cases a project may require the addition of many less skilled individuals for a short period of time, perhaps to perform repetitive tasks on hundreds of systems in support of a large scale implementation of new hardware or software. Outsourcing in this instance reduces the burden on your human resources department. Individual interviews, administrative processing, and payroll functions are all avoided.

Two advantages are gained by project oriented outsourcing. First, the specialized team focuses only on the goals of the project and is not distracted by the day-to-day requirements of the operation. Therefore, completing the project on schedule is much more likely. Second, your current staff continues to support their internal and external customers without a reduction in the quality of service. Many projects are poorly implemented or never completed because the internal staff can’t contribute the necessary effort while supporting day-to-day activities.

For example, a western state grocery chain with a multi-platform (UNIX, NT, Novell, & Mainframe) LAN/WAN architecture supporting over 125 sites and corporate headquarters was planning to upgrade their WAN infrastructure. Without proper documentation of the existing systems, upgrading was nearly impossible. The grocer contracted an IT services firm which completed the necessary documentation project in less than three months without interruption or degradation of service to their end users.

Outsourcing possibilities range from complete IT staffing, maintenance, administration, and leasing of hardware to occasional staff augmentation for special projects and short-term help. Industry trends indicate that outsourcing is on the rise. Gartner Group research indicates that “by 2002, the complexity of distributed environments will force at least 65% of organizations to adopt a hybrid support structure (internal and external) to best meet end users service requirements.” As complexity increases and change occurs more rapidly, looking beyond your corporate enterprise for IT support becomes more and more necessary.

Who do you call on Saturday night?

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John Cosby is a Project Manager with CGS, Inc., a computer systems integration and consulting company with offices is Los Angeles and throughout the US. Mr. Cosby specializes in network integration projects and can be reached at [email protected] or at (213) 625-2655.