mardi 18 février 2014

Making Good Use Of The IT Support Department

By Dave Cummings


When IT support services were first introduced to the business world they were usually only manned by one or two technicians. Their main responsibility was to ensure that systems were backed up, and computers were kept working. These departments were quite often based in a small room where the technicians could be found surrounded by diskettes, tapes, and broken computers.

In a lot of companies at that time, users would often attempt to fix any problems themselves, rather than call for help. This has all changed now. Networked systems, and sophisticated software, have meant that the support engineers have to be highly skilled, and understand many different systems.

As the complexity of the IT systems grew, the manpower required in the team needed to increase. There was a requirement for people with various skill sets in order for the department to cope with the variety of technologies used within a single company. However, there was still the legacy equipment to look after, along with its inherent compatibility problems.

The way that an IT support team operates has had to change to cope with the growth of multinational companies, all working in different time zones. The departments are normally open 24 hours a day throughout the week, especially if there is just one support team for the whole global network. This means that if a user wants to report a fault, it is typically done by raising a support ticket on the company intranet.

Raising a ticket, or a request for help, may seem a bit extreme to a user who is just having problems with an e-mail account. However, this information can then be targeted at an engineer who is experienced in such problems, and therefore, be able to rectify the situation quickly. They might also find an underlying fault in the system due to this single report.

On a few occasions, what seems like a basic e-mail failure report might be an early symptom of a much bigger problem. It could be that similar faults have been reported by people in different locations throughout the world, and this would only be noticed if there was somebody to collate all the tickets. With this knowledge, problems can be escalated, and more members of the team allocated to solve them.

The systems that need supporting these days can be extremely complex, and a large number of businesses use external companies, rather than keep the department in-house. These consultancies will then call on freelancers local to the company in question to help rectify the problem. The cost-effectiveness of using this method depends on many different factors, such as the budget and size of the business.

Over the years IT support has changed quite dramatically. Companies have come to realize that without these engineers, business can collapse very quickly. The manpower used in these departments have to be highly skilled and understand, and keep themselves updated, in many different technologies.




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