6 ways to turn your IT help desk into a strategic asset

The IT help desk is often considered the “dungeon” department in most IT organizations: a place where those who can’t excel at anything more meaningful in IT are left to linger, or those who are just starting out in IT must prove their mettle before launching their “true” IT careers. The help desk can also be a kind of IT “purgatory” that is difficult to escape without connections within IT who can help you move to a function deemed more important to the organization.

IT attitudes shouldn’t be like that. The IT help desk is not only a great place to start a rewarding career in IT, but it’s also the primary day-to-day “touch point” between IT and end users — and thus an invaluable and perhaps the only reliable way for IT to gauge the business success of the applications and systems it deploys.

Here is a look at strategic intelligence CIOs (and the rest of IT) can learn from their help desks and how CIOs can leverage the help desk for greater business value — if only they viewed the help desk as strategic in the first place.

1. Mine the help desk for business pain points

CIOs are expected to be business-savvy and technology-smart. IT staff members are also being worked around by users who have become so frustrated with IT that they are developing their own citizen IT.

Enter the help desk, for there is no one better than help desk personnel when it comes to knowing where business pain points are. The help desk gets complaints on a daily basis. Unfortunately, once these complaints get logged and hopefully resolved, they’re often just filed away and everyone forgets about them.

CIOs can change this mode of operation by transforming help desk “complaint intelligence” into a strategic input. Help desk activity reports should be summarized and reported on monthly to top IT management. In this way, CIOs and IT managers have visibility into the primary business pain points and areas of customer frustration so they can proactively strategize work that solves these issues.

2. Include the help desk’s input into future application design

Senior help desk personnel should be given a seat at the strategic table whenever new IT applications are proposed. Help desk personnel have substantial knowledge of user likes and dislikes. They can provide insights into effective application design. This can preclude the development of overly complex user interfaces that users find burdensome, or application workflows that don’t fit the operational flow of the business.

3. Initiate IT culture change on the front lines

CIOs are being asked to make IT more service-oriented, but effecting a culture change isn’t always easy with staff who are more likely to be comfortable cutting code or solving system issues than working with end users.

CIOs can promote a shift to service by elevating the status of the help desk with a promotional ladder for those who desire to make the help desk a career. It can also be beneficial to rotate developers and business analysts through a six-week help desk “shift” so they can improve their ability to empathize with users and gain from front-line experience with the business on where the primary business and system pain points are.

4. Treat the help desk as talent incubator

Nearly every company has open reqs for IT positions because the IT talent shortage remains. Consequently, CIOs have had to figure out new ways to “grow” talent, such as hiring raw and inexperienced individuals from the outside.

Community colleges and universities teach students how to code and work with IT systems, but they can’t teach students the particulars of your own IT environment. A great place to break in new talent is to start them at the help desk. They’ll acquire a working knowledge of users, IT staff, and company systems. Coupled with a strong upskilling program, the IT help desk can be transformed into a strategic talent pipeline for serving business needs right.

5. Start IT’s self-service strategy here

Users want to be able to self-schedule IT service, and to have access to relevant information through a user-friendly online portal that enables them to immediately resolve many of their own issues. This is why an effective user self-service portal should be a help desk initiative that is on every CIO’s list. The help desk should be the strategic lead for this project, since it is IT’s primary service point for end users.

6. Implement AI to diagnose hidden trouble areas

As AI gets deployed, one IT area where it could be beneficially used is in application congruence. This is an area where help desk professionals can help.

What the AI can do is use business rules defined by IT, and principally by the help desk, which should play a leading role. The mission would be to identify incongruent areas of systems that are frequently hit with malfunctions and errors. AI can then be used to identify any other downstream systems and functions vulnerable to the problem. Strategically, the end goal is to develop comprehensive IT solutions that are far-reaching in the improvements they deliver to all systems. This can reduce user frustration, diminish IT maintenance backlogs, and improve system performance.

Shift your viewpoint on IT’s ‘dungeon’

Historically, the help desk has been an underexploited and underappreciated IT resource — yet in the era of IT as a service, there is no IT function closer to the end users on a daily basis.

It’s time for CIOs and IT as a whole to put their “ears to the ground” to hear what the help desk has to say and to view the help desk as a strategically rich area of insight and opportunity integral to “the more important” work of IT today.