Should You Outsource Your Help Desk

 

Many IT managers dream of entrusting their in-house helpdesk to an outsourcing provider. Others fear that it is the worst that can happen. In the new era, bring your device (BYOD), it's a more significant decision.

In the boardroom and on the board, the notion of offloading a significant portion of IT operations to third parties creates fantasies of huge savings that will drive results. Many CIOs imagine that outsourcing technical support will allow them to redirect their IT teams and resources to higher-level tasks, more focused on necessary business skills. They even think about providing routine projects, like desktop updates, to the tech support provider, freeing up even more resources.

Other senior IT executives have a more troubling view of disappointing service, dissatisfied end users, IT disruption, and intangible costs that undermine the supposed efficiencies that help with office outsourcing can bring. Deeper into the IT organization, outsourcing technical support is often seen as a nightmare. The biggest fear is that senior management will start mass layoffs to get savings immediately, while minor concerns include the need to clean up the work of others.

Each of these dreams is grounded in reality. Since an organization decides to use third-party technical support and searches for one, then creates and maintains the relationship, everyone determines what type of dream comes true.

Evolution of help desk outsourcing

IT outsourcing is a huge category, and technical support is only a small but essential part. Other forms of IT outsourcing may include transferring entire data centers to third parties or perhaps limited to third parties that may cover corporate networks and applications. Technical support is often one of the first service companies to outsource and sometimes acts as a pilot for outsourced tracking services. It is also important to note the often blurred difference between outsourcing, which simply means that third parties provide a service and outsourcing, which says explicitly that the service is provided by a company abroad, presumably with significantly higher labor costs .

At the same time, the cloud is interfering with traditional definitions of outsourcing. Desktop as a service (DaaS) and other types of cloud-based virtual desktops represent new ways for non-traditional players to offer services that overlap with traditional technical support. Gartner Inc. recognized this in its latest Magic Quadrant report on the subject. Gartner's influential Magic Quadrants position providers along the x and y axes to show the strength and relative breadth of multiplayer.

In its 2013 report, Gartner consolidated the Magic Desk and Help Desk quadrants to reflect changes in support services. In the text of the quadrant report that Gartner now calls the "Magic Quadrant for End-User Outsourcing Services, North America," Gartner analyst David Ackerman and two colleagues highlighted the primary sources of development for the category.

"An evolving workforce model, more mobile and more virtual than ever will continue to challenge traditional work models and IT service delivery approaches," said Ackerman and co-authors William Maurer. And Bryan. Britz. “The net impact will be increased demand for call center features and continued growth in support for mobile devices. These factors will also drive the growth of cloud printing and storage services. We see that BYOD is accelerating. .. quickly in North America over the next three years. "

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