Reducing Costs and Improving Service with Remote Support

Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
So, this sets off a chain reaction of events. And the net, really, of this slide is that a lot of time is spent resolving issues. And in this particular scenario, we're talking about a service breach that has already happened. So, we're already building up time to be notified about this. The individual that's at their work station is going to call whomever their contact is, if it's the service desk directly, or another contact who will then in turn call the service desk. There's going to be time spent identifying the problem, correcting the problem, and then validating that the correction was made.

Now, all of those things can happen really quickly, or in a longer timeframe, especially when you don't know what the issue was, especially when you find out about the problem after the fact. So, in order ... the problem you have to figure out is what caused the problem. And if you look at the slide, I really love this graphic because it shows the roots protruding, tripping over each other, getting entangled and entwined. And when you're trying to find out what caused a particular issue to occur, that's exactly what happens in your environment.

There are some tools that can help you figure out what a root cause ... you know, the root cause of a particular problem is. But, generally, the ... things are pretty intertwined and meshed together. And there can be a lot of factors. And what you're really trying to do is to find out what triggered the problem. And the main reasons why you're trying to do that is because your customer satisfaction level is at risk, and, therefore, your reputation as a company is at risk. Your credibility is at risk, that of the IT organization, potentially that of the organization. And ultimately, you want to divert the SLA breaches that may have occurred. You want to minimize them.