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Look around any Fortune 1000 organization and you'll find a variety of service desks and/or help desks for both employees and external customers. Perhaps you'll see one or more IT help desks – one for logging routine HR matters, one for logging manufacturing defects, and another for customers to call with product-related problems or repair calls. Despite their different functions, locations, and personnel, all of these service desks have one thing in common – they provide a vehicle for handling the organization's problems, with specific groups of employees taking and following up on telephone calls or e-mail messages.

On the other hand, if you’ve got multiple service desks, this involves having multiple products maintained by a disparate group of people. It requires multiple storage mechanisms and flows, different processes, data stores, techniques, and interfaces. All of these requirements put an unnecessary financial burden on IT, and on the entire business. In addition, employees and external customers might feel the effects of this service desk redundancy because they might not be sure of where to go for help.

As a result, it’s easy to understand the cost and efficiency benefits of consolidating the service desk solutions into one platform. Enlightened software vendors are addressing this need. After all, regardless of the functional area of business, the consolidated service desk provides employees or external customers with one central place to go to enter problems, receive confirmation that the work will get done, and monitor the status of the work. In fact, three years from now, there will not be separate help desk and customer support solutions. There will be a consolidated service desk solution. This may even happen sooner than you think.

How to Begin the Consolidation Process

Organizations can lay the foundation for their consolidated service desk by first examining whether their different groups – internal and external – actually need different functions. Do they really need different processes, or can they get away with leverage the same ones? Where's the commonality across the environments?

Armed with this knowledge, IT organizations can plan to eliminate duplicate tools and flows, and make an investment to have a consolidated solution for the environment. However, they might want to start small by leveraging some common elements across different environments. The first task might include combining two service desks with a standard set of processes, a common set of interfaces, and a common flow. For example, some of our customers for many years have used some type of a single consolidated service desk across their internal environment. They've achieved this functionality by putting all of the internal help desk systems together, and parceling out the work according to which group needed to respond to a particular problem.

There are no real standard best practices for running a consolidated service desk across multiple disciplines, both internally and externally. However, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides some good best practices to help guide you in this consolidation, such the recommendations for incident management and change management.

The consolidated service desk uses a common technology, a common set of processes, and a core set of interfaces and interactions. For example, a Web front-end provides a common access method for both employees and external customers to submit problems or review them. You don't want to deploy a client on every desktop, especially for external customers. You also need a self-help capability, such as a knowledge-based system, which enables people to look up information and solve their problems on their own.

How the Two Service Environments Are Merging

Some of our customers have already started to consolidate their internal help desks. This consolidated desk often contains details about service agreements, entitlement, and provides self-help – capabilities that previously tended to fall into the external customer support realm. In this merged environment, organizations are starting to gather data related to both desks, such as configuration management, which is also critical to external customer support environments. To this end, external and internal services areas, which tend to have little interaction with each other, are inheriting more and more of each other's functionality.

What’s the Payback?

Help desk and customer support applications should have many capabilities in common. More recently, some of our customers, for example, started using our customer support system for internal support. That motivated us to look at taking key functionality from each desk and see how it could be consolidated it into one solution. Our vision is for the two solutions to come together to form a single technology base with all the features needed for external customer support, and all of the features for an internal help desk. To this end, you can leverage all the available features in the solution to provide a richer result to combined customers in both environments. This means that you’ll have additional features more specialized for one environment than the other. It also enables you to get entitlement support so you can actually start offering different levels of service to internal people as appropriate to your environment. And for external customer support, the addition incorporating ITIL best practices provides guidelines previously unavailable.

The big gains of this approach come from having a single technology that provides your staff with a single set of learning for managing all of these environments. By eliminating the need to run different processes, you can use common mechanisms to run multiple business processes, or multiple aspects of your business. As a result, you can run your business more efficiently, while saving on maintenance and management. So, get ready and start planning about how to leverage these capabilities, because a consolidated service desk will be here sooner than you think.

Doug Mueller, CTO for the Enterprise Service Management Business Unit, BMC Software. Doug Mueller is a co-founder of Remedy and is involved with product architecture/development of the BMC Remedy Action Request System and applications.