Swale Borough Council selects Richmond SupportDesk to bolster IT support

Employees log own requests on web-based system

Background

Swale Borough Council has chosen Richmond SupportDesk to manage the support facility for their entire IT infrastructure including communications covering their mobile phones and telephony services across 3 sites supporting 450+ employees.

“We needed a replacement for our previous system to effectively manage the 1,000+ incidents the IT service desk team deal with on average per month, enabling us to prioritise workload and make best use of the available resource with the ability to escalate calls to prevent SLA breaches.” said Julie May, ICT Service Desk Manager at Swale Borough Council.

The Solution

Swale Borough Council has purchased licences for the entire IT service desk team. The system was implemented in just three days, which included integration with their existing information systems and remote support software allowing the service desk to remotely support end-user machines directly from Richmond SupportDesk.

With the council spread across three sites it was imperative for the system to easily allow end users to log and check the status of their own technical issues via a web interface.

Tracking the progress of IT support requests keeps staff informed and reassures them their requests are being managed effectively.

The Results

“Richmond SupportDesk has made a significant difference to the way the IT service desk team works. Quick incidents have enabled us to log all contact with the department, even if it is just a simple password reset. We now get much better statistics on where support resources are being used so we can address areas where training or updates to software or hardware could improve IT service reliability.” Julie May continued.

Now that all IT issues are logged tasks can be reviewed and prioritised allowing job requests to be handled quicker with skills base routing of calls to make best use of the available resource. With all jobs now held centrally the Management Console enables managers to run reports and see exactly what is happening in the department.

“Richmond SupportDesk stood out for many reasons including offering a phased approach to implementing ITIL. We have started with incident management and are now looking to introducing problem and change management” commented Julie May.

The Future

Since successfully deploying Richmond SupportDesk Swale Borough council have purchased more licences for use in the IT development team so development requests can be managed effectively.

They are also planning to add Richmond PC Inventory to automatically scan their network for all hardware and software including operating system versions, processor type, memory usage and hard disk space, to enable them to instantly get a snapshot of the equipment they are supporting.

By knowing exactly the hardware and software which resides on their network they will further improve the service they can offer through correctly identifying configuration issues up front.

Click here to download the PDF version