It is rare that new technologies are touted as less user-friendly or less intuitive than previous technologies, and yet users appear to be calling help desks with growing frequency. At the same time, IT departments are being asked to focus their resources on creating strategic value rather than dealing with day-to-day operational demands. However, help desk operations may have seen budget and staff cuts in the last couple years.

Barry Lowry, director of IT Services at the Northern Ireland Civil Service is familiar with this conundrum. Lowry led the effort to build the Northern Ireland government's information and communication technology shared services center, which came to be known as IT Assist. 

Lowry's IT Assist program supports more than 18,500 users throughout Northern Ireland's 11 departments. It united components of seven different IT delivery groups, streamlining common services such as desktop support, email, WAN and LAN services. In this interview, Lowry explains what is behind the volume of help desk requests at his organization and how the IT assist program has made IT services delivery more efficient and cost-effective.

FierceCIO: Have you seen a rise in help desk requests in recent years?   

Barry Lowry: One of the main technical challenges in developing IT Assist was to migrate all users to a new single infrastructure and active directory and then retire the aging existing infrastructures. During the first two years of operation, help desk requests steadily rose as new departments were migrated to IT Assist, but as we approached a steady state, we could see a reduction beginning to occur. In 2010 we dealt with almost 83,000 incidents, as opposed to nearly 86,000 in 2009. This was partly due to the provision of the newer, more resilient infrastructure and partly due to IT Assist using problem analysis tools and infrastructure monitoring tools to be more proactive in fixing potential problems before they could occur. 

One of the trends we have noticed is that a growing proportion of the incidents relate to line of business applications. This is because the Northern Ireland departments now realize the advantage of IT Assist managing their line of business calls, and passing application problems back to them or their application provider for resolution. In the last quarter, around 25 percent of incidents have been line of business. It is one of the additional benefits of sharing services that these can be managed in a very efficient, customer-focused way. 

FCIO: What technology or device or system has caused the greatest spike in help desk requests? 

Lowry: One of the key strands of the Northern Ireland Civil Service Reform Programme was the introduction of an approach to records management based on an electronic document and records management solution. This was introduced in 2007, not long after IT Assist was established. The roll-out plan was very aggressive with all civil servants trained and using the product over a matter of months. It generated over 7,000 calls in its first calendar year of implementation--understandable given the scale of the roll-out, but a challenge for IT Assist when we were committed to so many improvement projects of our own.

FCIO: How have the budget and staffing for your help desk operations changed in recent years?

Lowry: The investment in the total help desk operation has reduced over the last couple of years, which has freed up investment for new projects. This is likely to continue over the next couple of years, although most of the savings will be given up as part of wider efficiencies. The general stability which we have achieved has made this possible.

Our first line support has stabilized significantly over the last year. We now have about 30 staff, of whom 25 are supporting the user base at any one time. We try to rotate the front line staff to give them experience of project work and other aspects of the service. This represents a 10 to 15 percent reduction on previous years.

FCIO: What are your policies regarding workers using personal devices for work purposes? 

Lowry: As a U.K. Government body connected to the Government Secure Intranet, we are obliged to adhere to the guidelines and advice provided by the UK Government's National Technical Authority for Information Assurance. This means that the only devices we permit on to our network are government-provided, approved products. We are however beginning to look at a number of cloud-oriented technologies which would allow us to ultimately facilitate the use of personal devices.   

FCIO: To what degree have mobile technologies affected the volume of help desk requests?

Lowry: We have totally changed [our] mobility model over the last couple of years, including the mandated use of encrypted machines and USB devices. These interventions have certainly created spikes in incidents but, overall, we find the remote working environment that we have created is pretty stable.

FCIO: To what degree are business units calling their own shots with regard to IT decisions? Do any units select and purchase their own IT independent of the IT department?

 Lowry: One of the benefits of our governance model is that it provides an excellent structure for partnership, working between IT Assist and the business areas. Consequently, while business areas are not allowed to "call the shots" where there is risk or potential detriment to other parts of the business, there are forums where changes can be agreed upon by all the business areas implicated and then introduced by IT Assist over agreed timescales. IT Assist now has change management and service on-boarding processes which make the introduction of change reasonably painless. While the business areas have some flexibility in the procurement of line of business solutions, all infrastructure assets are purchased and owned by IT Assist. 

FCIO: What tools are you using to manage IT services delivery and reduce the amount of time your staff has to spend on help desk requests?

Lowry: One of the very first projects which contributed to the establishment of the [shared service center] was the procurement of software from LANDesk. We chose LANDesk, not just because it was an excellent and flexible product, but because we were very impressed with the drive of the company and their commitment to helping us meet our business objectives, primarily the establishment of a first-class, ITIL-compliant service desk. We have certainly improved as an IT service provider over the last three to four years, which is confirmed by our service level agreement performance and our customer and stakeholder satisfaction results. And, dare I say it, I think the LANDesk product has also continuously improved over that period.

The technology serves a number of very important purposes. First, if a customer has an incident, we want to quickly fix it. LANDesk helps us to record the right amount of information about the incident and customer and to assign it to the right team for resolution. Second, we want to understand why the incident occurred and, if possible, make sure it does not re-occur. Finally, we want to be able to pull information from LANDesk into our Business Intelligence tool to establish trends and provide the best possible evidence to inform our decision making, our governance and our customer briefing. 

I tend to think that the success of IT Assist proves that if you have very good people and give them good processes and good technology, they are likely to achieve great things. Certainly, ITIL has helped us develop really good processes and LANDesk is one of a number of excellent technologies that we deploy, but the core to our success has been our people, who have proven themselves to be adaptable, capable and committed to continuous improvement.