Four Steps to Achieving Pervasive Support
By Anna Sz. Orbán

Almost all workers in today’s business environment depend on IT services to perform their day-to-day jobs. Any disruption in these critical services, regardless of the cause, results in reduced end user productivity, results in lost business opportunity and can significantly impact revenue.

To minimize this downtime, IT organizations are implementing comprehensive Support Automation strategies. Support Automation technology is the set of tools and processes that enable the prevention, diagnosis and resolution of computer problems with little end user knowledge or intervention. These strategies address the challenges of both business and IT by identifying and resolving service disruptions, meeting demands of business users, reducing lost productivity and revenue, and improving the bottom line.

How, then, do you begin to define the scope of an effective Support Automation initiative? What is the appropriate level of IT investment for this project? How do you prioritize spending for a service desk solution? How do you determine which application of Support Automation will provide a greater return on investment and value to the business?
Proven best practices suggest that these questions can be answered by following these four essential steps:

Step 1: Understand what drives the organization’s business objectives.

Every company seeks to boost profit through increased efficiencies and reduced costs. Productive employees enable organizations to deliver products and services efficiently. Therefore, you need to recognize which of the organization’s business objectives such as improved productivity, reduced technology costs, better/faster decision-making, etc.--can be addressed via Support Automation. It is important to understand your key business drivers in order to choose the solution that best fits your business needs.

Step 2: Assess current support capabilities and processes to identify maturity gaps.

Determine whether or not limited remote diagnosis and repair capabilities are undermining productivity as they relate to your business objectives pinpointed in step 1. For example, are a limited number of subject matter experts (SMEs) undermining support personnel productivity by forcing them to travel too much? Does your service support delivery system provide end users with a unified view and an audit trail of their interaction with the service desk? Knowing where gaps lie in IT capabilities and processes is the first step in ensuring you are on track to making improvements.

A mature service support delivery process includes the use of powerful remote diagnostic and repair capabilities that empowers your Level-1 support personnel to increase first-call resolution.

Self service is often an area where Support Automation capabilities can make remarkable improvements. Many organizations put inadequate self service resources in place because they only look at the cost of developing and maintaining content. A thorough analysis can reveal the savings Support Automation delivers by preventing and deflecting calls to the service desk. In addition, Support Automation capabilities are easily added to self service knowledge articles to automate high-volume low-complexity problems, enabling you to reallocate SMEs workloads for optimal efficiency.

Automating problem detection and resolution enhances the support organization’s ability to prevent issues and quickly address them before they impact employee productivity. Similarly, by deploying automated self-healing routines you will enforce corporate desktop configuration standards and reduce support issues resulting from non-compliance.

Step 3: Map the maturity gaps associated with the organization’s business objectives as discovered in step 2 to Support Automation solutions.

Support delivery consists of three distinct areas that should be included when mapping to your business objectives: live support, self service support and self healing support.
Live support provides technicians with the ability to remotely collaborate and provides tools to remotely access and repair the end user’s computer. This optimizes the service desk technician’s contact time by facilitating a less expensive channel of interaction and by automating the detection, diagnosis and repair procedures during the problem resolution process.

To restore services quicker and increase first call resolution, an evaluation of the Support Automation solutions is required to ensure that automated diagnostic and repair routines are incorporated into the live service support processes. An ideal solution enables end users to request support via a secure online chat interface allowing them to continue working uninterrupted while the technician delivers an automated resolution.

Self-service support empowers end users to resolve their own computer problems through web-based access to easy- to-administer solutions. By adding automated self help capabilities to the service desk, end users can run automated repair routines to restore services and decrease the number of calls to the service desk.

Self healing solutions provide the ability to transform support organizations from reactive to proactive entities by providing technology that monitors the state of software, hardware, and registry and configuration settings. As part of a truly pervasive Support Automation strategy, self healing routines ensure computer compliance with corporate standards and will resolve common problems even if the end user is not connected to the network.

Step 4: Project the economic impact of the solutions identified in step 3 to calculate their relative ROI and prioritize their implementation accordingly.

To justify the investment in Support Automation, it’s important to properly analyze the financial impact of the Support Automation initiative on the business. Support Automation can be measured in one or more of the following areas: cost reduction, cost avoidance or revenue protection.

To calculate the potential economic impact, there are a number of questions need to be addressed. For example, will the Support Automation effort increase the service desk capacity by at least 25 percent? Will escalations to assisted support be reduced by more than 15 percent? Will end user satisfaction increase at least 10 percent?

To choose an effective Support Automation solution that meets the organization’s goals, it is critical to understand the cost structure of your IT support operations and the economic impact of end user downtime to the business, and the value of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Whether you’re addressing the quality of service support to increase customer satisfaction or transforming the support organization to preventative from reactive. By following this four-step approach, Support Automation will rapidly deliver measurable results.

About the Author:
Anna Sz. Orbán, Support Automation Business Technologist at CA , analyzes the economic value of Support Automation projects for CA customers worldwide---giving her a unique and practical perspective on how IT service desk support can help organizations achieve their business goals.