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Support ModelIn addition to management-oriented Governance Model, each IT service delivery organization needs to have a Support Model. It is about a set of processes, interfaces, functions and documentation to implement the interaction between the IS/IT and the end-users.How extensive the Support Model shall be, depends fully on the case. For example, a consumer-facing online store need rather different Support Model from an engineering office. The support model is not only about reactively responding to user interaction, but also about handling feedback
and proactive problem management.
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Where Is the Support LocatedIt is quite a common idea to deliver the support from India, where the labor cost is low. Let us have cost savings!The costs directly related to customer support will certainly decrease, but what about the other costs, and loss of efficiency? How much would it make inefficiency when two people neither of whom speak their mother tongue and who barely understand each other try to create a common understanding of what it is all about. An offshore support potentially has a big question mark: Those customers who want to be served in their mother tongue. The question on the location is much more multidimensional than about cost only.
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Reporting - Quantity or Quality?Reporting is vital to Service Level Management. A significant number of the decisions regarding the future are made based on it.But what is a report? Is it those two or three figures expected by the top management, or is it an Excel table printed onto a five centimeters thick pile of paper? The scope and depth of reporting has its business impacts. Even if the low-level systems can produce more figures than there is ink in the world to print them, the figures must be structured and analyzed before they are useful. Even reporting needs its own policy and rules!
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OffshoreThe question of where the service is produced from is wider than just where the users are supported from. There are options available, and they are not mutually exclusive.The term "Offshore" is a euphemism to producing services somewhere outside of Europe: often from those Southeast Asian countries where the labor cost is lower. Usually the word is synonymous with "India". The Asian cultures are very different from the European ones and most organizations established in offshore locations have
encountered memorable experiences, and business cases have not always realized according to dreams.
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Do You Pay for Work You Do Yourself?Outsourcing can be a traumatic experience, especially for a first-timer. My own child, whom I have taken care of for years, will be taken away from me, to be stolen by someone else. They can't, they definitely can't!At its worst, outsourcing trauma turns into the fact that the customer's old team – or even a single person – does not want to give away its own baby, and the way of working does not change. The objectives of the outsourcing are not realized, an unnecessary complexity is created in the process and the customer pays the service provider for doing works which belong to the service provider. Lue lisää... |
Service Request PortfolioA service request basically is an instrument to produce any IT services that other processes do not produce. This "dump yard thinking" is flexible, but in the longer run it may lead to an uncontrolled service suite in terms of cost and content.ITIL declares a term Standard Service Request. It is a task included in the Service Request Portfolio, and it usually can be fulfilled quickly. The speed is not about being out of control: Even standard request may require authorization. Companies are not always very eager to make their service requests standard ones. This is short-sighted.
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