CXO Roundtable

Computer Technology Review hosted a panel with three industry experts to discuss some of the challenges IT organizations face in meeting enterprise customer satisfaction. Based on their field experience and expertise, David Messina, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Xangati, provider of the RPI appliance; Rodric R. O'Connor, CTO and VP of Blum Capital Partners; and Evelyn Hubbert of Forrester Research, were asked about the impact of the enterprise help desk and its importance in problem resolution as well as best practices for current and future IT operations in meeting end-users’ needs.

What are the biggest challenges IT departments face with respect to end user satisfaction?

Rodric: User’s expectations are being driven by their experience with consumer applications such as Google and Skype and mobile technologies such as the iPhone. As a result, IT departments are being forced to support more services, devices and applications with the objective of continuing to control operational expense.  To add to the situation, the underlying infrastructure that supports all of this has become more complex—which requires a radical change in the way IT manages the infrastructure and serves its users.

David: It is apparent that the pressure to support new applications with fewer resources has placed IT departments at the center of the classic “no win” scenario. To add to this, every time a new application is introduced into the ecosystem, there is no way to determine how it will impact every server, client, application and network. In many cases, once a new application is rolled out, there is a perceived “disturbance” that typically manifests itself as a network or application performance and availability issue. IT departments typically do not have a way of determining how it affects the overall infrastructure. The end result is a long and laborious process for problem resolution and users that are increasingly frustrated—eventually losing faith in the helpdesk process.

Evelyn: The difficulty is actually from the end-user perspective as they do not understand how IT actually works. This is evident in the user not understanding the status of their requests. IT needs to provide enhanced visibility to the end users with the visibility of service level agreements, how well they are met and what is done to correct the lack of meeting them.

How can organizations improve the responsiveness of their helpdesk personnel?

Evelyn: Incident management needs to be part of the culture. Helpdesk personnel need to understand that they ARE what the business thinks IT is!!! Whatever they do is shaping the perception and end-user satisfaction. The personnel needs to be trained how to respond to incidents, with tools for early resolution, workarounds and some problem resolution. They need to maintain ownership and communicate status in a timely and appropriate matter. Take incident management seriously!

David: To reiterate what Evelyn has said, the help desk is the face of the entire organization and the reality is that these individuals are not sufficiently tooled to do their jobs effectively.  The current tools are very desktop-centric and the reality is that an end-user’s productivity is ultimately tied to the performance and availability of the networked applications—not those on the desktop. The front line support group needs to have the capabilities and resources required to resolve issues in real-time. By having a “live” view into an end-user’s issue, the help desk should be able to handle a significant percentage of these problems directly instead of escalating the ticket to more senior technical staff.

Rodric: The value of  an on-going relationship between the helpdesk employees and the users should not be underestimated. Executive IT should be involved and understand what is happening on a day-to-day basis and not simply be focused on managing the organization with reports and metrics. It is critical to have the right individuals and the right number of skilled IT professionals in the front line. Organizations need to understand the ratio between user downtime and IT personnel costs.  Although it varies between and within enterprises, in a highly compensated environment, IT departments can justify a high ratio of helpdesk personnel to users.

With shrinking IT staffs predicted over the next few years (both in numbers and in expertise), what changes will be required to satisfy the support requirements of the enterprise?

Evelyn: Service catalogues were introduced a long time ago; however, the adoption of such has not been keeping pace. IT needs to start to work on self service options to reduce the amount of incidents; for example,  password reset takes about 80 percent of helpdesk time. Additionally, automation across the different processes and in the different domains needs to be adopted—his allows the reduction of errors and freeing up of resources. Finally, IT needs to stop creating “heroes” such as  the senior network engineer who is the only one who can solve the problem via a command line interface.

David: To Evelyn’s point, relying too heavily on the organizational “heroes” can cost companies quite a bit of time and money. Organizations will need to look at staffing, processes and solutions to determine how to get senior staff out of “fire fighting” mode so that they can focus on the company’s more strategic initiatives. Most companies have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing management systems and cannot afford wholesale changes to their network. A solution is required that supplements the legacy management systems to provide an overall picture of all the elements—servers, clients, applications and networks and the relationships between these elements.

Rodric: Organizations need to invest in the tools and infrastructure that allows the IT personnel to maximize their efficiency. The migration to both SaaS and virtualization is going to free up resources in the infrastructure area that potentially can be transferred to more front-line support and business interaction roles. I believe that SaaS desktop applications (such as Google Apps) will significantly reduce the complexity of the desktop environment.

How can support organizations be more proactive and how will it affect enterprise resources and budgets?

Evelyn: Reactiveness will always be there as some things cannot be planned for. But IT can become more proactive if they balance the people, processes and assets correctly. From a “people” perspective, more request management and self-service activities need to be introduced. Additionally, the incident management process – receiving incidents from the users - needs to be changed so that IT can detect performance issues before they cause problems. On the process side, the alignment between change, configuration and release management will reduce a lot of the rework that occurs today.  Many problems in operations are introduced because the left hand does not know what the right hand did. On the asset side,  IT needs to really manage its components (configuration items) —either physical or logical—as these components need to be known and understood (for compliance, audit and security reasons) and need to be continuously updated and tracked. This is what ITIL v3 calls configuration management system or ITIL v2 calls a CMDB.

David:  I agree that IT organizations need to direct their resources toward proactive problem resolution and be in a more predictive mode when it comes to network, application and user issues.  By leveraging solutions that develop a profile of every element on the ecosystem, support organizations can determine when a certain application or network is performing outside of the established profile.  With systems continuously comparing live activity vs. profiled activity, IT will be notified of any significant changes in the behavior patterns of applications, end-users and networks and they can resolve any issues before productivity is affected.

Rodric: With the right tools and processes, IT groups can be more proactive about identifying potential issues before they become problems for users.  For example, there are management tools that will enable IT organization to identify rogue software applications or user activity that is affecting overall network performance.  By identifying and isolating these types of issues, organizations can put in place a process that allows them to proactively address the issue with the affected user or users before the situation becomes more serious.  This increases productivity for users and saves the IT department countless hours that would have been spent tracking and fixing problems.

How will IT practices and process be affected by the increasing demand to implement and manage strategic corporate initiatives focused on enterprise mobility, SOA, virtualization and convergence?

Evelyn: All of these new technologies are introducing challenges for IT Operations (operation control) as it is difficult to manage them in conjunction with the existing infrastructure.  These technologies might save cost on one side of IT (e.g. Application Development and SOA),  but on the other side (IT Operations / Operations Management / Control) they cause additional issues. IT needs to start bringing more control to an earlier stage in the process—the service design stage. This stage is important as it will define the impact of a new technology or service or both to the IT Operations.

Rodric: Some things will get more complex, others will simplify. The iPhone is going to have an impact on enterprise mobility but there will be another painful period of adoption now that it has become a more “business-centric” device. We are still in the early phases of understanding the impact that these types of disruptive technologies will have on IT groups. SOA and Virtualization have the potential to reduce complexity after the initial migration period.

David: With so many new initiatives being added, the reality is that it will be tougher on IT before it gets easier. These organizations already are challenged to manage all of the IT assets today, but what happens in an SOA world with mash-ups, where services are dynamically divided up across the entire infrastructure?  Instead of managing each server, client, application and network individually, IT must determine how these elements interact with each other across the entire infrastructure. IT will need the right products and processes to help them determine how these elements behave under “normal” circumstances in comparison with what is occurring in real time across the network ecosystem. It is through this analysis and comparison that organizations will be able to manage the increased demand these initiatives will place on the entire company.

What change can Enterprises make today to lower help desk costs and increase overall productivity?

Evelyn: Service catalogues and self services can assist with the productivity. The analysis of the incidents coming in to the helpdesk will enable IT to determine some of the typical incidents that reoccur all the time. By aligning this with a good problem management process, which resolves reoccurring incidents once and forever, IT will have a really good start. Most clients never really look at their incident management database to determine what can be done. Most likely, there are already a variety of issues that have been covered relating to training, processes, applications and specific vendor technologies.

David: Companies have rolled out quite a few “productivity” applications designed to make its users more efficient but have very little understanding about how these applications will affect the networks, its users and other applications.  As a result, when a new application is introduced, the help desk often is inundated with calls complaining about network and application performance issues. By providing the right systems and training, the help desk would have a more holistic view of the interactions between users and applications in addition to specific information about how these applications were “supposed” to be performing in the first place. This information would empower them to resolve issues in the front-line of support, driving down mean time to resolution, and reducing overall operational costs.

Rodric: To reiterate, I think it is important to have these issues resolved by  highly skilled personnel in the front line of the organization.  By having a higher skill set in the front line, it will reduce the continued escalation of an issue and allow the user to more quickly receive solutions to their problems.  By equipping these personnel with the right set of solutions that provide IT with a view into all the elements and an understanding of the relationship between those elements, they will be able to manage and maintain the balance between all of the existing architecture and all of the new applications, devices and technologies that have been demanded by the user population. This enhanced visibility will enable organizations to dramatically reduce time spent on problem resolution.

Biographies of the participants:

As vice president of marketing and product management at Xangati, David Messina has fifteen years of experience in the marketing and selling of enterprise, consumer and service provider networking equipment on a global level. Prior to Xangati, Messina held product marketing and marketing communications executive positions for CoSine Communications and Bay Networks (acquired by Nortel Networks). He holds a BS in Economics from The Wharton School, UPENN. David Messina can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

As a senior analyst with Forrester Reseearch, Evelyn Hubbert serves IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals. Covering IT systems management, her current research focuses on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the realization and population of a configuration and change management database (CMDB), business service management (BSM), and many other aspects of infrastructure system management. She helps enterprises to manage their networks and systems, define key projects focusing on IT service management, and bridge IT to the lines of business. Evelyn has more than 20 years of experience working with IT organizations in the definition and development of the IT service delivery processes and the implementation of IT service management as a practice inside enterprise organizations.

Evelyn came to Forrester from Hewlett-Packard. Most recently, she was the director of competitive intelligence and value delivery chain program manager in the HP OpenView organization. Prior to her work in HP Software, she worked as an IT consultant inside HP's IT organization. A native of Germany, Evelyn has a master's degree in computer information systems from Colorado State University. Evelyn Hubbert can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .