Everyone in your organization has the opportunity to speak with the front line support staff.  The Help Desk typically has more contact with the employees than any other team or department.  Each user contact is a precious opportunity for the Help Desk to make a positive impact and instill confidence in the user base.

Scientific studies have shown us time and again that humans make quick initial decisions due to our most basic instincts.  We all make up our minds about a website in milliseconds.  You don’t have a chance at quality perception without a good front line support team and process.

The following 10 tips can help you improve or turn around the perception of your IT Department or Help Desk.

1. Courtesy Follow Ups: Commit to contacting a certain number of users per day/week and stick to it.  Users may be in a different frame of mind during the follow up and a positive interaction after their issue is resolved can reinforce their experience.  If 20 technicians each make one follow up call per day, that is 5,000 contacts annually (wow).
2. Automated Notifications: Most Service Management Systems include automated notifications to end users for ticket actions like assigned, opened, closed or updated.  Make sure the notifications provide value to the end user and are not sent so frequently they’re considered spam.  Make it as professional as possible.
3. IT User Committee: No matter the size of your organization, you need an IT User Committee.  This committee may be selected stakeholders in departments you work with often or another subset of users as appropriate (e.g. Franchisees).  This gives users a voice and your committee can be your advocates to carry your message throughout the organization.
4. Right all Wrongs: Things will go wrong with IT, but it’s what you do when things go wrong that makes all the difference.  If you build up user confidence in advance with some of the other tips listed here, you will have some capital to burn when something goes wrong.
5. Review your Escalation Process: Users are often happy with a great front line support experience, but when escalation is required you may find that the experience drops off.  This could be a result of problems with process or resource allocation, but some can be resolved by clearly setting expectations.  Simple process reminders to the user base are important.
6. Set Expectations: Severity, Priority, Workflow State and Urgency are all fields that may be used to capture priority and determine response time.  Above all else make sure the system achieves the goal of setting expectations for users and technicians.  A close second is the ability to measure your support center on their ability to deliver service.
7. Demonstrate Value: Help Desks participate in projects ranging from software QA to hardware refreshes.  Track those projects and report back to your IT committee.  If your team is overloaded with requests consider limiting each department to a certain number of special requests per month.  The SCRUM project management project process may work well for this.
8. Problem Management: Ideally you will have an innovative technician with a primary responsibility of problem management to create efficiency and enhance the user experience.  Take action on the issues you identify and report the results to the appropriate people.  (e.g. 30% reduction in user password reset calls)
9. Knowledge Management: Make sure your Knowledge Management process is well structured and not neglected.  It should not be cumbersome for techs to update knowledge (think wiki).  With an appointed knowledge manager to QA changes, empowering the team is a good idea.
10. Outsource if Appropriate: Not all situations call for outsourcing, but if you’re having trouble managing a Help Desk, you may want to consider an Outsource Help Desk or Service Desk.  If they’re a professional organization, they have all the systems and processes discussed here in their day-to-day operations plan.  Outsource Help or Service Desk managed services is a predictable way to provide front line technical support 24×7.

In the future I will be posting 10 more ways to help you achieve the goal of improving your IT department perception.  This may all sound daunting, and depending on the tools and staff you currently have to service your organization, it may be.  Choose the manageable items that will make the biggest impact for your users and consider outsourcing or consulting to fill the gaps or help you get where you want to go.

Viruses and spyware are a plague in today’s interconnected environment. In our day to day IT Support activities we are often asked how to mitigate the risk of a machine becoming infected and also how to manage ongoing viral infections.

Unfortunately there isn’t one answer that fits all. Viruses and spyware can be complex. Good internet browsing habits alone are not enough.  Working on an outsource help desk the user base and skill level is diverse and I have seen even the most prudent users become infected.

Here is a list of things you can do to mitigate your users’ exposure to Viruses and Spyware:

For IT Departments:

1. Content Filtering: Use content filtering to limit the websites you or your user base can surf.  In an enterprise this can be accomplished with a hardware appliance like Barracuda or SonicWALL.  You can also utilize a SaaS (Software as a Service) application like Message Labs or WebRoot.  Though often too restrictive, strict content filtering is one of the only reliable preventative measures available at this time.
2. Limit End User Permissions: Removing the user’s local admin privileges prevents them from installing programs and other activities that may leave the PC open to an infection.  Using an asset management or desktop management tool, you may be able to further limit applications or easily modify group policy to enforce additional restrictions.
3. Outsource your Endpoint Security (Desktop Management):  There are a variety of Managed Service Providers and Outsource Help Desk and IT firms that will “manage your desktops”.  This usually involves a suite of managed services targeted toward endpoint security, which removes distraction and allows an internal IT team to focus on other projects more aligned with business needs.  If you require complete management of the desktops and end user support, these services can usually be bundled with outsource help desk support, sometimes 24×7.
4. Enforce Best Practices – Raise Awareness: Make your service desk and help desk teams acutely aware of the best practices of your support center.  If you’re working with an outsource help desk managed service, ask them what their standards are and ensure they align with your expectations.  Empowered, the team will naturally educate users and look for risks while working on unrelated issues.
5. PC Imaging: Get an imaging process in place so you can quickly restore a user’s PC.  If they’re properly managing their files this should work without losing data.  It would be an inconvenience and could act as a deterrent from them engaging in future activity which could cause their PC to be imaged.

For End Users:

1. Internet Explorer Active X Settings: Internet Explorer is the most commonly attacked browser, most often via ActiveX that automatically downloads the malware..  However many SaaS (Software as a Service) and web based applications are optimized for IE.  Disabling ActiveX can help. Disabling IE scripts from running automatically will also secure the system but unfortunately will reduce the improved functionality of the browser.
2. Web Surfing Habits: Being aware of where you are going on the Internet is your best protection against any attack.  Beware of pop up windows and sites that have them with any frequency.  If you go to a website and you get a pop up message that says anything to the effect that the site detected a virus and wants to clean it up, run the other way.  Hit escape, back, alt+F4, or anything else but clicking OK.
3. Choose your applications wisely: Often times freeware applications (applications that don’t require purchase) come with a cost in the form of bundled spyware and even viruses.  If you want a freeware application you can often find user reviews that will alert you to these issues, so do some research.  Downloading illegal software of any kind will often leave you infected for a number of reasons.
4. Run an Anti-Virus or Anti-Spyware/Malware program: There are free programs that you can attempt to piece together to protect your system (e.g. AVG Free, Spybot), or you can pay for an anti-virus suite like AVG Professional, with improved reliability and functionality.  There are also SaaS (Software as a Service) and MSP (Managed Service Provider) offerings.
5. Use an alternate browser like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.  While these browsers may provide better security against Internet Explorer targeted attacks, you should not expect a system to be completely safe.

Though it didn’t make many headlines, those in the IT Managed Services space relying on Cisco are acutely aware that their increasing lead times on products peaked in February.  While it’s true that in the past some resellers have had shortage issues, we don’t see that happen with large purchasing services that manage their volume and ensure product is in stock and shipped quickly.  However, as of last week we were actually quoted 4 months for a firewall from a multi-billion dollar partner.  We were able to go to another partner for the same equipment.  However some of Cisco’s channel partners with reseller agreements or Managed Service Providers without diverse IT purchasing operations are feeling some pain.

After experiencing this, we stocked up on some ASA firewalls just to ensure that if something happened with a client’s network infrastructure we could address the issue expediently.  The only article I found referencing this (from the UK interestingly enough) has some jabs from Watchguard expecting sales to pick up due to Cisco’s inability to deliver.

Last year Dell had the same issue, struggling with some assembly engineering problems on new products.  It was taking 4 months to get a laptop and indeed a large number of clients gave other vendors a try.  If the incumbent vendor performed well, they didn’t switch back.  As a managed services provider focused on quality we aren’t prepared to  consider a switch from Cisco for network infrastructure projects, but we will be watching the situation closely.

You may have heard about Google’s effort to provide communities unprecedented Internet connectivity speeds of over 1 Gigabit per second.  At this point they’re asking cities to return RFIs (Requests for Information) so they can determine where to build their infrastructure for the trial runs.  A deeper look at their description of the fiber optic trial, dubbed “Google Fiber for Communities” explains their stated reasons for this strategic move.  A primary driving force behind this effort is to provide developers faster speeds in order to accelerate the next generation of app development.

The architecture required for speeds like this doesn’t exist on a large scale today.  In fact, Google will probably not be the first provider to offer these speeds, but they will certainly accelerate innovation.  The bottom line is that it’s clearly a strong push of Google’s Cloud Computing agenda.  If successful, this would provide an incredible catalyst to the SaaS (Software as a Service) industry, which is experiencing historical growth.  With Google Apps Enterprise, Gmail, Google Wave, Google Chrome, Postini and the rest of the franchise, SaaS is something Google knows a little bit about.

ARHD CTO Josh Lippy says “This is part of their grand plan to own the Internet.  By providing 1GB speeds, they’ll be able to push their thin client agenda to the masses.  Chrome operating system and chrome browser for all things computing.”

Google wants to do away with the traditional desktop operating system (that Windows thing), and replace it with a managed service.  Their offering will be an easy to purchase streaming thin client desktop service, most likely paid for based on usage.  The speeds Google is pursuing are the only way to ensure success.  Cloud Computing will take incredible leaps with that kind of speed, not to mention they could start offering television programming with that kind of throughput.  Is there a Google channel yet?

You can go to Google and search for “Google fiber” to learn more.