Reducing Costs and Improving Service with Remote Support

Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
There's still the fact that you are the face for the organization. However, you're often in the middle of change management. You're in the middle of CMVB initiatives. You have a lot of touch points to a lot of different organizations within the enterprise, which we'll talk about on the next slide. And you're also involved in process deployment as a driver for the service desk, along with its challenges.

The second bullet, "Cost Control and Limited Staffing", that's one thing that I think hasn't changed a whole lot since I was a service desk analyst myself. Cost control has always been an issue. The service desk has been somewhat unappreciated in some organizations. And there's generally been a limited staff that's expected to accomplish a whole lot in a short window of time for the organization, all while maintaining a positive face for the enterprise.

So, the evolved service desk ... if you're looking at the slide, the bubbles in the center of the slide really reflect many different management technology disciplines, and surrounding those management technology disciplines is the service desk. So, simply the message that we're trying to get across here is what exactly is the evolved service desk? And it is essentially an organization that has to have a touch point with every technology silo that exists today and those that are going to come on the scene as we go forward in the future.

Outside of that domain, where the center bubbles are down at the bottom, are different types of technologies that have even tighter links or are often part of service desk technology or closely related solutions. So, things such as the service catalog, such as self-service technologies, such as security and building a model for the service desk are all very closely related. They're gathering information from all the different technology silos that are in the center at the top.