November 12, 2001

Strategic Support

The growing link between IT and business strategy requires rethinking the customer support model

by Raju Kocharekar

Reflecting the evolution of underlying IT and business models, organizations are changing the emphasis in IT from "technology" to "information." IT departments that fail to understand these new priorities have the potential to jeopardize not only their ability to meet end-user support needs but also the implementation of the entire IT strategy for the organization. This change in focus warrants rethinking the IT customer support model from product-based to user role-based.

To understand this paradigm shift and the growing link between IT support and strategy implementation, you must first understand the history of IT support in organizations. As computing technology proliferated across the organization with the advent of PCs, IT support became essential. Although initially peers and power users provided sufficient support, the growing complexity of technology forced organizations to formalize and consolidate the support - first at the user department level and then at the enterprise level. This support model has largely focused on products, such as ERP and other institutional systems, document management and groupware systems, or personal productivity systems. In the process, IT support became a commodity service.

IT's New Mission

Many organizations' IT departments are now redefining their mission statements to match the changing business reality - people don't want to hunt for information among multiple systems and products; they want information made available when they need it. IT's new mission is "the right information to the right people at the right place and the right time" (4Rs).

Fusing this new IT mission to the organization's mission is what can make IT a strategic asset. Whether business or technology is driving these changes is unimportant. What matters is that they closely intertwine, one stimulating the other, which makes IT critical.

The new IT architecture is coming of age. Legacy systems form the foundation layer of the new model, while the top layer is highly role specific, with heavy personalization of information. Portals form the middle layer, synthesizing information across multiple systems. They bridge the gap between end-user role-based information needs and the complex process- or function-oriented legacy systems. These portals will help fulfill the IT department's mission of 4Rs.

Even though the information architecture design is understood, implementation is in phases. In many cases, companies are still improvising the architectures as they learn from experience. The reality is that the role-based layer of the architecture will remain weak, or even nonexistent, for some time. And in spite of substantial intelligent automation, systems won't do the complete job in the middle and top layers. These weak layers, therefore, must be augmented by critical, yet costly, IT customer support.

New Support Requirements

Today, end users either know or must determine which product they need help with. They must then find support people with the right product or function knowledge. In the future, users will just describe in business terms what they are trying to accomplish, which could require coordination and integration across multiple products. Users will not know where the data sources are, nor would they care; they just want help solving the problem.

With products increasingly providing a context-driven, self-guidance environment, support staff will need to focus on understanding the business context of the task that the user is trying to accomplish in order to help navigate multiple systems. The support person must become more familiar with the user's job environment than the individual product technology. They must speak the user's vocabulary.

• Privacy
• Your California Privacy Rights
• Copyright © 2008 United Business Media LLC