Remodelling the Service Desk for your Digital Workplace

The Digital Workplace has been with us for a while now. It’s a movable concept of fluid, flexible and enabling technologies that are being used to liberate organisations, their managers, their workers and their resources from the traditional constraints of fixed-everything working.

In a Digital Workplace, one or more workers, in one or more places, can do one or more tasks, using one or more platforms via one or more devices at any point in a time zone-free day (or night). This provides the organisation with increased performance, optimised efficiencies and as a result, otherwise unimaginable competitive and commercial advantage.

From the IT leaders’ viewpoint, things look rather different. Devices, platforms, applications and intentions are no longer as easy to keep tabs on as once they were. The needs of end-users are less easy to anticipate or to provide for. All of this can result in IT Leaders all too easily finding themselves attempting to tackle today’s challenge, using tools designed for yesterday’s technology.

The Digital Workplace challenges for IT leaders

As a company that provides IT support to organisations in a diverse range of verticals, Acora believes the Digital Workplace poses four specific challenges for IT leaders:

1. In-house resources lack the time required to review, plan and transform – BAU is all consuming.
2. There’s a drive for in-house IT resource to add value, rather than simply support users/platforms.
3. Telephone and email support channels alone are too inflexible to meet the needs of a Digital Workplace.
4. The digital workplace evolves weekly, making the role more about training and explaining “how to”.

How IT Leaders can respond

IT leaders whose remit involves supporting a Digital Workplace have no alternative but to embrace a total transformation, in order to provide the business with effective support.

Traditional channels alone will not cut it. When asked, employees prefer “asking a colleague” or “looking online or using a self-help resource.” In the new Workplace, users require multi-channel access to support to drive satisfaction and engagement. To deliver this, IT leaders need to look at instant messaging, self-help resources, knowledge guides, desk-side briefing sessions and webinars etc.

Once the new support channels are deployed, the traditional measures also need to change. After all, user satisfaction is the key metric.

Deploying an effective workplace transformation capability could be the trigger to looking for external support, either for implementation or ongoing managed support. The value being chased in productivity and collaboration are perhaps the areas in-house resources are best focused on leaving support and BAU to a managed service provider working for you, to your SLA’s.

Getting help

If you’re managing a Digital Workplace transformation, we’d be very happy to talk with you. Get in touch.