Why you need a Help Desk

A help desk is a resource which provides information and assistance to troubleshoot problems with information technology equipment or services. It provides a single-point-of-contact for users within your school to report and resolve technical problems.

Our experience demonstrates a dramatic improvement in technical support function when a Help Desk is implemented, because it allows you to prioritize and track support requests, focus your limited support resources, and apply expertise at a level matching the issue at hand.

Help desks can be configured in various ways, but as a minimum should offer these 5 features:

1. Centralized system used throughout the entire school
2. Simplified interface for adding, updating, and tracking requests
3. Prioritized to effectively allocate resources and escalate support requests
4. Separate from you key infrastructure to eliminate your Help Desk from failing
5. Accountable to you in order to report and review technician effectiveness

What does your help desk look like now? Here are some we have observed first hand:

• Sticky notes handed to your IT person as they walk down the hall
• An interruption while in the midst of another support request
• An "oh by the way" mentioned at lunch
• A complaint in a meeting related to another subject

Although very common, none of these improve the performance of your IT staff. And in some cases these informal help desk habits can be very counter-productive.

Take the case of handing a sticky note to your technician as he walks down the hall (presumably on his way to another support request). Your interruption causes a lack of focus on the issue at hand, and the issue at hand causes a lack of attention to your request. This is a double dumbing down of the process.

An orderly help desk system is much more rational. User's generate support requests and are required by the system to categorize, prioritize, and then provide sufficient detail for the technicians. Technicians are notified much more efficiently and an accounting begins for that issue. Both parties, and others, can update information about the request and track the issue to resolution. Administrators can measure the rate and number of support incidents and have a better sense of the value a support mechanism is providing.

A byproduct of a robust Help Desk is the ability to archive resolved issues into a Knowledge Base which in turn provides a growing body of support information for your school. As this body of knowledge grows, the ability of users to self-help increases.

Most schools we observe, and all that we manage (by definition) have no full-time IT staff. A Help Desk in this scenario becomes a necessity. And we have found it very helpful to identify one or two gatekeepers in the school to take the responsibility of entering in technical support requests.The advantages of this arrangement are significant; a full-time support component, a better perspective about priorities, and a single point of contact for clarification and reporting.

Whether your school is large or small, simple or complex with respect to technology, or supported by internal or outsourced technicians you will benefit from a Help Desk.

In these resource constrained times you would be foolish to operate without one.