I admit, “end-user support” sounds kind of old-fashioned. But in many respects just the opposite is true. In the digital age the need for easy access to new services is on the rise, and even with a much ‘hipper’ (and increasingly impatient) end-user population, the need for support and guidance remains. It is just taking different forms than in the past.
On October 4th I’ll be doing a webinar on this very topic. I’ll be looking at it from multiple perspectives, including the rise of a more diverse and strategic role for IT service management (ITSM) overall, as well as the need to create a better highway (not just a narrow two-way street) between the end-user consumer and IT—with a building commitment to stronger end-user experience. Indeed, improved end-user experience is one of the core foundations not only for successful ITSM, but for IT as a whole—whether it’s in accessing new services, support for onboarding and incident management, or for more effective productivity in using IT-delivered applications.
I’ll also discuss how the gameplan is changing for how to improve end-user experience, with growing requirements for responsive design in supporting options for mobility, laptops and traditional desktops in service access—both for IT professionals and for end-user service consumers.
As a part of improving end-user experience, I’ll be addressing the new era of self-service—a topic that could certainly inspire a single webinar in itself. One of the cornerstones of self-service is a growing variety of options in service catalogs in providing access to a full range of IT services, from applications to onboarding, to services involving IT-to-IT requests, such as access to Infrastructure-as-a-Service resources from internal or public cloud. Knowledge management is perhaps the single central foundation of better self-service. But once again it requires that two-way dialog where IT and end-users learn from each other both in terms of needs and requirements, as well as in terms of the best options and answers to address them.
And finally, we’re seeing an advancing role in analytics to support superior levels of self-service. These can range from integrations with operations analytics that provide proactive guidance for incident resolution, to cognitive services that can interact directly with end users seeking guidance.
