Setting a Course: Goals for the Help Desk

Key Findings Majorities of respondents have documented goals in place for help desk service availability, user satisfaction, and call/incident resolution. Important drivers of central IT help desk improvement include improving user satisfaction, meeting the changing needs of help desk clients, and improving help desk efficiency. Important obstacles to improving the help desk include rapid growth in user demand, lack of funding, and lack of staff expertise. Only 40 percent of respondent institutions have strategic plans in place for their help desks. Adoption of formal guidelines for four IT service management (ITSM) practices is widespread; these are availability planning, change management, capacity planning, and release management. Among institutions that use service level agreements (SLAs) for help desk services, adoption of guidelines for all four ITSM practices is 1.5 times higher than in the overall survey population. In general, respondents say the help desk is adequately included in central IT activities related to ITSM practices. Where this is the case, the priority that central IT places upon deploying easy-tosupport systems is higher, suggesting better communication between the help desk and other parts of the IT organization. ITSM practices and SLAs are more common where a strategic plan for the help desk is in place. Relatively few of our respondents have implemented databases for asset management, configuration management, or customer relationship management. u