In support, as in investing, there are short run and long run strategies.1
1. If you are a support manager day trader, you’ll just stop answering the phone to save a quick buck. This strategy saves money for several hours, after which time you are fired.
2. On the other hand, if you are a support manager value investor, you’ll turn off CNBC and invest in people, process, and technology, the building blocks for tomorrow.
But this is 2009 and tomorrow is so darn far off. As the economist John Maynard Keynes famously said a few years before the Great Depression, “In the long run, we are all dead.”
There is no free lunch, but fortunately, some lunches are freeer than others. Both IDC and Gartner have published reports in the last ninety days encouraging IT departments to focus on long run IT expenditures that have short run ROI. Among the areas cited by IDC2 are datacenter virtualization and remote support solutions. Why? It’s because these technologies have both short payback (often under six months) and strategic significance.
In the case of datacenter virtualization, you are consolidating your servers to get more with less. In the case of remote support, you are virtualizing your people, allowing them to support anyone anywhere.
The short run ROI of remote support comes from time saved driving onsite or troubleshooting over the phone. The long run ROI comes from transitioning support’s work from the cubicle to the Web.
No one technology or process is going to make 2009 easy for support organizations, but with a balance of short and long term perspective, the support manager can still make changes that will produce an ROI in 2009 . . . before we are all dead.
- This article originally appeared in the March/April issue of Support World Magazine, published by Help Desk Institute. [↩]
- “Rationalizing the IT Support Services Budget for 2009: Three Things Enterprises Should Investigate“, IDC 2009. [↩]
