ARMONK, N.Y. (02/18/2000) - Tired of those long queues and endless complaints about your company's help desk?
IBM Global Services (IGS) may have the answer in the form of a new automated help desk service the company plans to announce next month.
Called HelpNow, the service will let customers get faster help for big problems, such as network delays or outages, or for simple issues, such as a printer failure or a forgotten password. The service could also eliminate the need to expand help desk staff as a company's networked systems grow, IBM Corp. says.
With more users going mobile or working remotely, IT staffs are straining to keep up with delivering consistent service and support, analysts say. Many of these users are also turning to Web technologies such as e-mail as alternatives to a help desk to get faster answers to their problems.
With HelpNow, a user with a problem, such as the need to reset a password, logs on to an IBM Web server that has HelpNow software on it, says George Welyczkowsky, an IGS executive. After registration, the user is presented with a number of Web links that direct him to a category of problems. If he doesn't see the problem category, he can type in the problem and enter it into the HelpNow program, which contains intelligent code that will search for the answer. If HelpNow finds the answer, it can present the appropriate Web page to the user or refer the user to an administrator.
There are a variety of ways the service can be used, Welyczkowsky explains. For instance, a department head who needs to cancel network privileges for someone who has left the company logs on to the HelpNow site. Then he fills out an electronic form and submits it, instead of having to call in the request manually. The HelpNow Web page can also be personalized for individual customers, and can be used to post the most current anti-virus updates or software patches for a user's machine, Welyczkowsky says.
Self-help systems are beneficial to users who don't want to wait a long time for answers to their problems, says Theo Forbath, senior strategist at NerveWire, a Needham, Mass., consultancy. IT managers are constantly on the prowl for effective virtual services. What would be key to a product or service such as HelpNow is that it analyzes the help desk activity and generates reports to see where problems are occurring most and tries to minimize them, he says.
Another component of HelpNow is proprietary IBM Java software, called e-Classifier. E-Classifier is data-mining software that runs on a dedicated Unix workstation and can be used to drill into text files and trouble ticket packages residing on IBM mainframes. The software gathers information and acts as a librarian to categorize help desk problems and match them to solution scenarios.
In the future, IBM says it will consider selling e-Classifier to large enterprises that can tune it to work with their existing management software from firms such as Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard. E-Classifier runs on any platform that supports Java, such as AIX or Windows NT, IBM says.
This automated offering could be more time-consuming than a manual help desk, says Richard Lincoln, an IT administrator at Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada, an insurance company. "From my own experience, users don't want to know how to do it themselves. They would rather have someone else do it so they can concentrate on their own job," he says.
IBM: www.ibm.com