Help! I need some service!

[Community Alums]

I managed to get the Beatles' Help in my head while putting this post together, and it seemed like an appropriate spin for a title.

After my last post about my experience with my former phone company's customer support, I received some questions about my thoughts on the differences between a "help desk" and a "service desk." Because my interaction was with a vendor's external support rather than an internal IT group, wasn't that really a help desk? Isn't that different than what we do in ServiceNow?

At the risk of opening up a huge philosophical discussion (which could be quite interesting - so please feel free to comment!), I am going to present for you here some of my thoughts on the subject. This could potentially span multiple future blog posts as well, but I'm going to lay down some of my basic thoughts here.

I would like to begin with a couple analogies first, and then I will bring it back to IT Service Management.

The medium of music
I love music. I have over a thousand CDs and even used to DJ. To maintain my music collection and prevent myself from purchasing multiple copies of the same album, I also used to maintain a database of my collection. At first it was a spreadsheet, but this wasn't enough. I wanted to get more information and a spreadsheet would involve a lot of duplication. Add to the fact that my collection was growing pretty steadily, and it took a long time to enter information. Because of this, I kept the information I entered limited to some basic information — song, artist, album.

After some research, I found a database that could not only maintain more detailed information for me pretty easily, but it could compare my CDs to an online database and automatically populate information just by popping the CD in the drive of my computer and doing a quick scan. This was great, because I could then focus my energy on where the CD was in my collection. Along with the basic info I had in my spreadsheet, I also had release years, genres, and in some cases, lyrics and beats per minute (which can both be useful when DJing).

The problem was that to USE my music, I still needed to search through my CD collection, pull out the CD, and put it in a CD player. The database gave me lots of information, but in many cases, I could still search through the CDs pretty quickly if I knew what I wanted without referencing it.

Enter the world of MP3s. With the advent of this digital format came the ability to tie the actual music to the database. Now we were talking! With a touch of a button, I could not only access any song in my collection, but I could generate and play an entire playlist based on certain information. Think about it: I mostly DJed 80s parties. If I wanted to put together a set of songs from 1983, I would need to bring up a list and then pull each CD that contained a song I wanted to play before this. This took significantly more time, and caused me to pay less attention to the crowd on the dance floor while I hunted down music.

Merging the music with the database added significant benefit.

Evolution of the phone
Let's take another example. Remember these?



Remember when you had to actually know the number you wanted to call? How about these:

I remember maintaining an address book (I never really got into the rolodex). Every time I had to make a change, it involved all sorts of erasing and scribbling. Contacts would rarely be in order within the letter, so it could take a little time to find someone if there were a lot of names under a given letter. Just like with my CD collection, if I wanted to actually contact someone, I needed to find his or her address or phone number in my address book to use that information.

You're probably thinking, "but, you could use an electronic address book." Sure. I did start using one as soon as it was available, but for a while, I still found myself maintaining a paper address book (and calendar) because I did not always have access to a computer when I wanted that information (The computer wasn't turned on all the time back then). This also meant that I was maintaining multiple copies of the same information, which leads to problems of its own. My paper copy, my digital copy on my computer, my frequently dialed numbers on my phone… even multiple phones at one point.

Remember PDAs? No, not Public Displays of Affection. Personal Digital Assistants.

These devices changed some of the way I worked. I could now maintain my addresses and calendar in one place (for the most part) electronically. I did still either need to maintain numbers in the address book on my phone or look up the information on the PDA to make a call. Still it cut down on how many different places I needed to maintain the information.

Now our phones are "smart." (Some people will say this is making us dumber, but that is a different philosophical debate). Not only can we maintain a single database of our contacts and calendars, but we can leverage the fact that the information is available by finding a contact and clicking on the person's name to call them.

Even better, the technology did not stop there. With GPS integration on these devices, you don't need to carry around a separate device with its own list of addresses to get directions. You can click on a person's address to get directions to his or her home.

Think of all the other things built into these smart devices that can be leveraged to add value:
•Cameras — tie this into the GPS and you can automatically add location information to a photo. You can also easily tag contacts and add photos to a contact record.
•Internet — look up people or businesses, get phone numbers and locations to call or map the company location with a tap of a button or the screen.
•Books — Not only can you save your back with a small form factor, but you can easily look up words or phrases or share quotes with friends through social media.

Help vs. Service - an evolution
Now what does all this have to do with help desks and ITSM? Well, to put it bluntly, a help desk is this:



and a service desk is this:



Help desks, just as the name implies, is just a group of people in an organization who are there to (retroactively) assist their customers (whether internal or external) when they need help. A help desk call typically starts with getting all your information, and that information is not tied to anything else. If you called a different group within the organization, this information would not be available to them, and if you've worked with a help desk, even if you contact the help desk, they are not likely to be able to bring up this information again.

Service desks, however, are more proactive than help desks. They tie in information from other sources to more effectively address the needs of their customers (again, internal or external). This approach has many benefits. Let's look at a quick scenario with the different setups.

Help desk
Each issue is worked on in an isolated fashion. If customers are having issues with email, the support technician focuses solely on getting those users up and running again. There may be a little checking to see if there are other issues that might be affecting email, but everything is disjoint. The support technician needs to get details from the end user and will focus on issues on the local system first. We've all heard the step to "Try to reboot." There is not necessarily any way to tie users who are having issues to the infrastructure that supports email. Proactive management of the services provided is either non-existent or separate, which causes a huge disconnect in the management of the environment.

Service desk
The service desk model uses a configuration management system to define email as a business service. All components of that business service are mapped to one another. If something affects the email business service, and someone calls in with an issue, the technician can do a quick look to see if any of the components that make up the business service are impacted.

If the configuration items that make up the business service do not have an issue denoted in the system, the technician can quickly check to see if others have reported an issue. If so, a problem can be opened to research the root cause. With ServiceNow, you can use this problem as a means for updating those associated incidents quickly and easily. The problem can have associated tasks to coordinate the different groups that may be involved in managing the overall business service.

For those service desks that want to go above and beyond with their level of service, they can monitor business services and their components and proactively address any issues that might come up. With its run book automation capabilities, ServiceNow could capture events from the monitoring system and take action to try to repair them before they are even reported. Also, with the type of information available in a service desk, IT can be proactive about managing change in the environment and do it effectively.

It brings different pieces that were traditionally separate tools to work as a cohesive unit.

Internal or external
Our focus in ServiceNow is typically internal IT, but IT may also be supporting services provided to external customers. Why shouldn't an externally facing service desk have good tools to help meet the needs of external customers, too?