Global Call Centers: Yes, No, and the Importance of Face ...

Leading IT Service & Support May/June 2005

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Global Call Centers: Yes, No,and the Importance of Face

Leveraging Support Knowledge

The 5 Habits of Highly Successful Hiring Managers

StrategyStrategy

People Mgmt.

Customer Service

Company Profile

Global Call Centers: Yes, No,and the Importance of Face

Customer Service

Leveraging Support KnowledgeCompany Profile

The 5 Habits of Highly Successful Hiring ManagersPeople Mgmt.

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Editor-in-ChiefJulie Neider

Art DirectorScott Hanson

Cinda DalyErik GraneredAllison Gross

Marc HeimlichRohit Joshi

Robert KoblovskyJen McClure

Jim McKennanTim Seiter

Jeff Warren

Contributing Writers

For advertising opportunities, call: Cheri Bruno • Advertising Director • 781.259.4230HDISM publishes SupportWorldSM professional journal six times per year. We welcome your input.

To submit articles, write or call: Julie Neider • HDI • 6385 Corporate Drive, Suite 301 Colorado Springs, CO 80919770.932.1868 • [email protected]

For subscription and membership information, contact HDI’s membership services center at:800.248.5667 • 719.268.0174 • www.ThinkHDI.com

The Daly Interview 6A Personal Interview with Jim Harris

Strategy 10Un-Idling ITIL

Customer Service 16Global Call Centers: Yes, No,and the Importance of Face

Company Profile 18Leveraging Support Knowledge

The HDI 2005 Trip Report 24

HDI 2005 Awards 28

Training 30e-Learning for the Contact Center

The Service Doctor 34Dr. Jim

People Mgmt. 36The 5 Habits of Highly

Successful Hiring Managers

Technology 40Automating Service and Support

Technology 44Empower Your IT Service Management

Environment: Interface Directlywith the Mainframe

Community News 47

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SupportWorldSM is published by HDISM

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Please send your comments and questions regarding SupportWorld.Letters to the editor should be sent to [email protected] or by mail to: 6385 Corporate Drive, Suite 301 • Colorado Springs, Colorado 80919

We reserve the right to edit all letters.

Dear SupportWorld Readers,

It was wonderful to visit with so many of you at the HDI 2005 Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.Reminisce about this highly engaging gathering of support minds by reading the trip report beginningon page 29. In addition to three days packed full of education, networking, and fun, we announcedchapter, team, and individual award winners (awards coverage can be found on page 28).Congratulations to all of those participating in our awards programs. For more information on how tobecome involved in HDI’s awards programs, visit http://www.thinkhdi.com/membership/awards/.

Interest in support continues to grow. As CIOs keep an ever more watchful eye focused on their servicecenters, managers are finding it increasingly more difficult to find ways to cut corners. It’s moreimportant than ever for those in the support industry to think outside the box in terms of change,training methods, support knowledge, hiring standards, and current technology. We have taken aninterest in and focus on these issues within the next 48 pages of this magazine. Be sure and e-mail mewith any questions you have about the ideas expressed within, or any beliefs, arguments, etc. youwould like to discuss.

HDI is excited to announce the launch of our new Metrics Guide. This guide is a set of books outlininga common framework for managers to benchmark and measure metrics within their supportorganizations. Created as a deliverable for Gold members and above, HDI is focusing on movingmetric measurement from reactive to strategic.

Are you interested in contributing an article for publication in SupportWorld? Please send article ideasto [email protected].

Sincerely,

Julie NeiderEditor

www.ThinkHDI.com x MAY/JUNE 20056

Negotiating the Perilsof Rapid Change:

Negotiating the Perilsof Rapid Change:

A Personal Interview with––– Jim Harris –––

By Cinda Daly

In October 2001, Polaroid—the company that came to

define instant photography—went bankrupt, blindsided

by the rapid rise of digital photography. With the

release of Napster, 18-year-old Shawn Fanning shook the

business model of the $40 billion dollar music industry

and changed the way music would be distributed forever.

In its first 18 months of operation, Napster software was

downloaded by 62 million users, and in February 2001, it

facilitated 2.79 billion music file transfers. The day after

Napster was forced to close by court order, 90 file-sharing

services had sprung up in its place. By September of 2001,

the top four services were collectively facilitating more

than three billion file transfers.

Jim Harris is one of North America’s foremost authors and

thinkers on change and leadership. In his most recent book,

Blindsided!, published in 80 countries worldwide, he uncovers

the blind curves of rapid change and shakes the foundation

of maintaining status quo.

THE DALY

INTERVIEW

Leading IT Serv ice & Suppor t x SupportWorld 7

Daly. Why are companies, even whole industries,being blindsided?

Harris. The speed of change—driven by newtechnology, mergers, and competition coming out ofleft field—suggests that the business landscape is morechaotic, confusing, and complex than ever before. Andthe speed of this change is accelerating. While it tookradio 20 years to attract 10 million users, it took TVjust 10 years, Netscape 28 months, Hotmail 18months and Napster only 12 months. The chances ofbeing blindsided have never been greater and areactually accelerating.

Daly. What do you point to as evidence that this isthe case?

Harris. We need to separate form from function. Forexample, The function of banking is essential, but thecurrent form of banking is not. Like the banks, manyorganizations are tied to the current form of theirproduct and service—everything is optimized aroundthat. And, when a new technology enables a new wayof doing things, the typical organization is incapable ofeither, one, seeing the opportunity or, two, takingadvantage of it.

Daly. Share an example.

Harris. During the late 1800s in North America, wekept our food in iceboxes. Ice companies thrived.Using saws, teams of men went out to the lakes andrivers in the winter and cut large blocks out of the ice,leveraged them up onto horse-drawn sleighs, anddragged them to barns where they were insulated insawdust. During the summer, blocks of ice werechipped off and delivered door-to-door by horse-drawn carriages.

Think about the skill sets required for the ice company:working with saws, working with horses, first aidwould probably be helpful, there would be a barnacquisition department, a door-to-door sales force, andan accounting department.

But when refrigeration came along, none of theice block companies survived. Why? Well, theskills required for operating a refrigerator makerwere different: handling compressed gas, designingcompression motors, manufacturing, and wholesaledistribution. The only competency that remainedconstant was accounting.

Daly. Can a healthy company be blindsided?

Harris. In answer to this question, think about driving acar at 60 miles per hour. At that speed we are supposedto keep 60 feet of distance between us and the car in frontof us. Imagine a driver on the highway at 60 mph—whena fog descends on him, he can only see 10 feet out. If youwere to measure the vital signs of both the driver and car,you would find they were both normal; although thedriver’s pulse might be slightly elevated.

But, I would argue that the driver is dead—becausesooner or later he will come to a bend in the road, anoncoming car, a stopped vehicle, or a cliff. The only wayto ensure survival is either to slow down or increase yourresponse time six-fold.

Companies get blindsided because people find change sohard to accept and cope with. Organizations used to havestable industries, predictable customers, and five- andten-year strategic plans. Today, whole industries are beingturned completely upside down in two years. Seeminglyhealthy companies that can’t recognize and respondquickly to change may be dead, but just don’t know it yet.

Daly. Why is it so difficult for organizations to change?

Harris. In the ice company, if you were a good sawhandler you became head of the saw department. Theemployee who handled horses best became head ofhorses and the best barn buyer became head of barnacquisition. The executive committee then was made upof people most vested in the old way of doing business—the people running the company had no experience inthe new ways of working.

Who’s closest to the future? The 65 year old CEO whodoesn’t know how to turn on the computer or the 18-year old who surfs the Web every night? Who does all thestrategic planning, and who is most disenfranchised fromstrategic planning? Is it any wonder we only getincremental change in organizations?

Daly. Are high-tech companies more vulnerable toblindsided vision than other industries?

Harris. No—all industries are vulnerable. Here’s anexample: For the first time in 50 years, sales of chocolatebars in the UK fell. Sales fell by £150 million in 2001. Wasthe culprit other sweet makers? No, because they fell too.The crisp makers? No. What then? Kids were spendingmore of their pocket money on mobile phone top-up cards.

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Spending on mobile telephones in the UK had risen to£6.82 billion in 2001 from £5.25 billion a year earlier.The biggest increase was on sending text messages onpre-paid mobile telephones, which is the rage amongteenagers. Instead of buying a Mars Bar, kids arescrambling together enough change to buy a £5 top-upcard so they can keep using their mobiles.

And, the future is not looking brighter for chocolatemakers. The number of young people—some as young aseight or nine—who own mobile telephones is continuingto increase. Do you think that in their strategic planningsessions, senior executives of chocolate bar makers werelooking at cellular phone providers as their competition?

Daly. So it does come back to technology in a veryorganic way. What can our readers do to help theirservice organizations avoid being blindsided?

Harris. Some companies, even entire industries, wereblindsided by offshore outsourcing, for example.Certainly, some service and call center organizations wereblindsided when the layoffs began a few years back,as companies moved their Tier 1 customer supportfunctions to Bangalore, India. Others see it coming intheir organizations, but don’t know exactly what to doabout it, for or against.

Job loyalty is the absence of a better value alternative.By continually adding more value, by continuallyquestioning whether there is a better way to do what wedo, we ensure our job security and provide thefoundation to avoid being blindsided. And, as you maybe well aware, some computer companies have movedTier 1 support back to North America after customerservice ratings plummeted.

Daly. How can IT organizations help uncover thewarning signs of blindsided vision.

Harris. Speed of recognizing and responding to bothproblems and opportunities is one of the keys to avoidbeing blindsided! Neural network informationtechnologies can help highlight when behaviors gooutside of a standard pattern.

Here’s a common example. A friend of mine used to keepa wallet in his car with unimportant cards—cards for hissupermarket, gas stations, etc. One day this wallet wasstolen out of his car, and he didn’t bother to report it untilthat evening. “After all,” he thought to himself, “how badcould it be? You can only fill up on one tank of gas.”

Wrong. The thieves had traveled all throughout the cityin an organized pattern going from one gas station to thenext buying cartons of cigarettes. Here’s a greatapplication for a neural net—has this individual everbought cigarettes in his life? No. Then it’s likely that thiscredit card activity is fraudulent given that he is buying200 cartons of smokes today.

Daly. That example offers a good justification forknowledge management technology. What other ideascan organizations use?

Harris. I offer Sun Microsystems as a role model forproactive vision. Its chief technologists regularly brief theboard of directors so that the most senior thinkers arealways in touch with the new trends. Several years ago,for instance, Sun sent a group of its best thinkers andinnovators to a site off campus to work on the future ofcomputing. This group realized back then thatcomputing would increasingly be ubiquitous—withsmall devices everywhere taking on computing functions.So, they created Java.

Daly. The crystal ball needs to stay polished and youreyes must focus on the future?

Harris. Yes. And, a key question is, “What systems andstructures can an organization put in place that willhelp guarantee that the best decisions are made?” Also,have the best technologist briefing the executivecommittee. Create a shadow board—just like the officialboard of directors but made up of 20- and 30-yearolds—and run every major decision by the shadowboard for its reaction. Continually uncover the trends,which are not always obvious, and search for new waysto get the job done.

As is the case in many of the martial arts, what can beused defensively can also be used offensively. So theprinciples of Blindsided! can be used, as well, to blindsideyour competition.

The Daly Interview™ is a publication of Focus Events, Inc.This interview was written exclusively for ThinkService, Inc. byHDI 2005 Program Chair, Cinda Daly, [email protected].


Technology is not viewed as an afterthought,but the maintenance and upkeep of thetechnology typically is...

...the entire IT focus is more offire fighting, jumping from onehot issue to the next.

by Tim Seiter

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Why and How to Start Without Top Management SupportIT within many companies is often viewed as anecessary evil or the group that simply fixes problemswhen they arise. Other departments rarely see orunderstand the business enabling initiatives that ITsupports. Technology is not viewed as an afterthought,but the maintenance and upkeep of the technologytypically is. In many small and mid-size organizations,it is fairly common to find the top IT person to be aworking manager. Some strategic direction may besought after, but the top IT person is not typicallyfound in the executive management meetings, nor isthe top IT person focused on key business aspects. Inthis scenario, the entire IT focus is more of fire fighting,jumping from one hot issue to the next.

If this sounds like your organization you may noticemakeshift processes are created to address individualissues, and there are many times where individualdepartments created great processes to manage the flowof information and issues within their realm.Unfortunately, it is the rare occasion when an overallview is taken to create global processes that touch allareas of the IT department.

Why Implement a New InitiativeSo, in an environment where there is little support for IToutside of the technology projects and firefighting, howdoes one try to improve customer service? The firstquestion to address is WHY someone would want to gothrough the uphill battles, pains of change, etc. toimplement best service practices. My answer to that issimple—it will either enhance your standing andcredibility with your current employer, or it will enhanceyour resume for your next employer. As a former IT guywho did everything from running cables throughceilings, to programming, to network administration, tomanagement, and up to and including a CIO, I have beenexposed to a variety of professionals.

The people who advanced and earned the respect oftheir peers and C-level executives were the ones whospent more time following processes and recommendingpertinent improvements to their customers instead offirefighting and following the “hero for a day” mantra.The latter may give you short term respect and admiration,but over the long haul, your customer just wants to do theirown jobs, make sure their own world is trouble free, and nothave to worry about their tools breaking down all the time.


Let’s use an analogy to provide some clarification on thewhy. During my daily shower, I expect certain things tojust work. When I turn on the faucet, I expect water tocome out, and I adjust it based on how hot I prefer it.When I switch over to the shower mode, I expect thewater to come out from the shower head after first gettingblasted with the cold water leftovers and cursing at myselffor never remembering this undocumented feature.

If the hot water does not come out, the last thing I want todo is call someone, wait on hold for 5-10 minutes, only tobe told to turn my faucet off and on again because I musthave touched the faucet the wrong way. I don’t care that theparticular hot water knob I have, which THE PLUMBERRECOMMENDED, is not completely compatible with thecold water knob made by the same company but just anolder model (uh…version issues). Nor do I want to hearthat the dishwasher is taking all my hot water away fromme during the time I need to take my shower(uh…bandwidth issues). I DO NOT CARE that there are 20other people also having trouble with the same thing, butthe Chairman of the Board in my house, also known as mywife, will not let me spend the $150 to fix the issue forgood. Nor will she let me spend $800 for the greatest toolin the world to fix this and 999 other issues.

I DO NOT CARE that the person I called just got that coolnew wrench that will do 999 things, but doesn’t yet knowhow to use it to fix my one problem. I DO NOT CAREthat my eight-month old shoved his toys down the drain,which is causing all sorts of havoc (uh…….virus issue).Finally, I do not want to be talked down to because I donot know that the flange is connected to the doohickey,which needs to be turned 2 degrees left of center when Iam using this particular hot water knob, this particularpipe, this particular faucet, on this particular leap year at6:47 A.M. during a full moon. I DO NOT CARE!

All I know is—I cannot get any hot water right now. Myentire day is now shot. Either I need to go on with myday smelling like baby formula because my eight-monthold decided that 3:00 A.M. was playtime instead of bottlefeeding time or things will not get done because Ihave to wait for someone to fix something that I donot understand. The WHY will help you identifyworkarounds until the permanent solution can beimplemented, identify a permanent solution to eliminatethe problem from ever happening again, identify theoverall value of the permanent solution (in case money orresources need to be spent), implement best practices tominimize the disruption, identify any compatibilityissues before that hot water handle is replaced, etc.I think you get the picture.

How to BeginOk, now we need to know HOW. The issue now is notto convince yourself, but to convince others. How canyou convince the CEO to spend $50,000 on a newtechnology that has no apparent direct revenuegenerating impact on the organization, instead of hiring anew sales rep that can generate $1,000,000 in revenuethat drives $200,000 to the bottom line that same year?You need to show at least $200,000 in VALUE that sameyear for the $50,000 you are going to spend.

Step 1—Pick a MethodologyPick a methodology and framework that recommendsbest practices, but is also flexible enough to conform toyour company’s individual culture. There are many outthere but I have found through trial and many, manyerrors that ITIL worked best for me. I viewed ITIL thesame way I viewed the frame of a house. It providedthe departments I managed with the structure theyneeded, but there was always room for another windowthrough which I could communicate with the “outsideworld,” or my customers. If you were picking up apackage at my house, you would not care how theinside of my house looks, how the rooms look, wherethe bathrooms were, etc. You would just want to beable to ring the doorbell and expect a timely answer atthe door. You would ask me for the package and thenexpect me to bring that package to the door, also in atimely manner.

This is how you should view ITIL. When yourcustomers come to your door asking for something,you should be able to respond in a timely manner withthe appropriate answer to their request. Yes, ITIL goesa lot deeper than that simplistic answer. It also talksabout measuring and monitoring your success throughmetrics and communicating your successes and failuresin a format your customers understand. Mostimportantly, ITIL is about providing and communicatingthe highest possible VALUE to your customers, albeitinternal and/or external. ITIL is about developingrepeatable processes to maximize efficiency andcommunication within the IT department and betweenIT and your customers. ITIL is about managing changeand minimizing technology disruptions.

Managing by processes is not new, and adopting industryrecommended best practices is also not new. Accountingfolks have been doing this for a long time, and my CPAof a wife will be the first to tell me, “It’s about time youguys in IT get your act together.” Well, we all know thatCPA stands for Certified Pain in the Assets, as well asCan’t Pass Again, but I won’t mention that since my

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better half will be reading this. Manufacturing has beenfollowing best practices since the creation of the wheel.Anyone who has seen “The Flintstone’s Movie” starringJohn Goodman knows that.

Step 2—Create a Track RecordStart small and spend no additional funds. Createprocesses that can be tracked with spreadsheets or yourcurrent software tools to demonstrate how you cancreate efficiencies and improve customer service. Picka process that you think is inefficient, but does nothave a huge impact. Track how much time is spentby all effected parties to complete that process. Dothis informally. If someone is involved but not inyour department, go to their office for an informalconversation. Take them to lunch and talk about it.Asking for formal meetings is not always the best ideahere because you tend to not yet get the full picture.Also, hang out in their work area. This is especiallyfeasible if there are cubicles. I found that I could sit inan empty cube in a nearby area if I just said I needed

to work on some network things in their areaand asked for an empty space for a day. Once there,listen and observe, document, and try and get a copyof the forms they are using on a daily basis that pertainto this process. During this interaction you shouldalso expand your understanding of your company’sbusiness culture.

Now, make the changes and track the results. Do thisseveral times until you create enough of an impact toshow qualitative, quantifiable, impactful data in prettygraphs and charts. Remember, ITIL is all about providingand communicating value in a way your customers canunderstand. If I cannot communicate the value a newFerrarri brings to my household, my spousal unit will notagree to the purchase. Thus, you need to communicatethe value you provide. Some stumbling and failure isacceptable because at this point no one is watching. Honeyour craft here. Make sure you improve your team’s skills.By the way, if anyone can help me with the whole Ferrarivalue proposition, please let me know.

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We invite you to join HDISM for the support you need to stay on top of industry trends, make better, more strategicdecisions, collaborate with your peers and guide your service and support organization to success.

With more than 7,500 members worldwide, including many of the Fortune 500, and more than 60 North Americanchapters, HDI is the world’s largest membership association for the IT service and support profession, and thepremier certification body for the industry.


Step 3—Build on that Track Record.Pick a slightly larger process that requires minimalmoney to be spent. Once you have shown you canimpact the bottom line with improving efficiency, selectone or two slightly more complicated areas. Explainwhat the before and after will look like with prettycharts and graphs, of course. Provide timelines thatyou are 100 percent sure you can hit and are shortenough to maintain interest. Do not over inflate theimpact you will have. This will just cause the powersthat be to automatically discount whatever claims youmake in the future. Involve more people, keep themexcited as to the end result, and provide results andvarious benchmarks. Remember to track, monitor,report, and track, track, track.

Complete failure is not an option here. Some stumblingcan occur because the expenditure is not that great, butremember, people are now watching. The powers thatbe are expecting positive results. They know all thetricks of explaining away the bad and focusing on thegood, so do not try and fool them. They have a boardof directors that do not accept revenue shortfalls sokeep in mind that they will not accept too muchaltering from the original plan or stated results. If youdo not experience the stated results, identify additionalsmall projects to create that credibility.

Step 4—Build on Your Momentum.Once you have succeeded to improve a little bit with nomoney and a little bit more with a small amount ofmoney, you should have the experience and credibility totake on that large project costing $50,000. Now all thepowers that be are watching. Failure is not an option. Youneed to build awareness and keep in touch with results.All your reports should be results oriented. Show the costof doing nothing as well as the value of following yourrecommendations. Report, track, report, track, report. Beprepared to make changes if you feel you will not achieveyour stated results. Do not hide your stumbles. Explainhow these stumbles will eventually improve the endresult. If you know you are not going to meet yourexpected results, let it be known as soon as you can. Donot wait until the end to state you knew you would onlyobtain 80 percent of your goals. What if the vicepresident of sales knew in June your company was onlygoing to meet 80 percent of their projected sales quotaand waited until December to tell the CEO? How longwould that person have a job?

Be very politically active with all affected parties. Just like inyour investigative phase in Step 1, informally investigate thestatus. Don’t wait for someone to tell you that hot water is

not flowing hard enough, or is the wrong temperature,or is leaking out of the walls. Go find out for yourself.Know where you need to apply more pressure to preventleaking and ultimate failure to occur.

Step 5—Bask in the Glory.This will last about a week, and then you will need to getback to work and show what you can do now. Yourcredibility is great, so use that to your advantage, but donot overuse it. There are politics in every company thatyou need to embrace to enjoy long term success. Learnand understand your business culture, then roll out yoursolutions based on this culture. Some of you will be ableto go faster than others. Remember the first and onlyabsolute rule in ITIL is you need to know when to breakthe rules. ITIL is NOT an absolute. Those of you who tryto stay within the ITIL framework for everything aredoomed to failure because your customers will throwtoo many exceptions for you to handle. ITIL is designedto allow for that room addition (the house analogy),knocking down a wall, or expanding that walk-in closetbecause your daughter needs 30 pairs of jeans and 50pairs of shoes, half of which look a lot like the same colorof black to me.

Remember, Rome was not built in a day, the aqueductstook years of planning to create those gentle slopes,Apple Computers was started in a garage, and theBoston Red Socks took 86 years to build another WorldSeries champion.

Build your credibility through small successes beforetackling those big jobs. DO NOT try to improveeverything at once. Take small steps, and you will have amuch better chance of success. At the end of the day, yoursuccess will push you higher at your current company orwill be a very nice edition to your resume for that next job.

Tim Seiter is currently the Director of ITIL Services atConexio. He holds his foundation certificate in ITIL, and theHelp Desk Manager Certification from HDI. He has 20 yearsexperience in IT, performing all sorts of roles from Help Desk,Network Administration, programmer/analyst, and all levelsof management. Conexio specializes in providing unique ITService Management solutions to business organizations. TheirSmart@nalysisTM is just the first step in helping organizationsstart and stay on the path of IT Service Management. You canreach him at [email protected].


Following is an excerpt from the book Global Call Centers:Achieving Outstanding Customer Service Across Borders andTime Zones, authored by Erik Granered. Global Call

Centers delivers a back-to-basics message with an emphasis onhuman communication and cross-cultural agent skills. In hisbook, Erik argues that the business of outsourcing is now at apoint where we can learn from experience and reduce thefailure rate in international customer care.

Yes, No, and the Importance of Face“Face” is a phenomenon that really has no comparableexpression in Western culture. It is a “comparism” becauseit points to an individual’s perception of how the rest of theworld views him—with honor or dishonor. From thatperspective, very subtle behaviors can cause you toinadvertently disrespect someone, causing them to loseface. Face influences a large part of feelings and behaviorfor most of the population of the world, including mostLatin, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures.

For me, understanding the concept of face has been slow incoming. At first, it seemed alien and even silly to me. At somepoint I understood. I don’t know exactly when. It is real andtangible to the many other cultures. Just as time is a tangible forme in the West, face is a tangible thing in high-context cultures.It is like a barometer that constantly measures your honor asyou interact with the people around you. It relates directly towhat they mostly identify with—who you are, being—just astime is intricately bound to our Western identity of doing.

If an agent calls a senior manager in Japan and does not use theproper title to address him or jumps right into conversationwithout any courtesies, he or she could cause the Japanesemanager’s face barometer to go down dramatically. The agentand the company (which, by the way, are one and the same forthe Japanese manager) have not fully understood who he is, aperson of status who deserves to be treated as such.

Global Call Centers:Yes, No, and the

Importance of Faceby Erik Granered

As more and more support centers become involved inoffshoring, whether from a partial blending of services to a

complete outsourcing initiative; and as organizations continueto provide support for their products and services on a global level,it’s important to understand the challenges of communicating

clearly and effectively in a cross-cultural service setting.

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The most important thing to remember is to allow youragents to perform common courtesies in greetingcustomers thoroughly. Take the customer’s lead with regardto small talk before and during business talk. This can bedone by allowing for pauses in the conversation. Thesepauses are not perceived as uncomfortable silences as wein the West might perceive them. Instead they are seen asa courtesy. You are pausing to ensure that the person hasfully completed his thoughts. As easy as this might sound,it is a fine art that comes only with experience.

Here is an example of how face can enter into call centercommunications: An American software company hasdistributed a beta version of a new application to a smallset of user groups around the world. An agent has beenassigned to call one individual per user group to get earlyfeedback and initial impressions. The application iscompletely out of step with what people in the field need.It uses the wrong technology and approaches to solve theissues. Listen to how each beta user is attempting toconvey this same message to John in San Jose:

Agent John in San Jose:Please give us some observations on how thisapplication might help you solve your problems.

Olaf in Norway:This will not work at all. You are using a locallyinstalled application when we need a Web-basedarchitecture to address our warehouse integration.

Hiro in Tokyo:Hhhsss [sucking in air through his teeth to expressdiscomfort]. Yes, hello, John. Very nice to speak toyou. We have also seen a competitor’s solution thatuses a distributed platform. That was very nice forwarehouse integration.

Raj in Bombay:Yes, I see. Very nice. You have some very goodprogrammers there in San Jose [spokenenthusiastically]. With respect, sir, this may have tobe modified [his tone dropping to express discomfortat having to deliver bad news]. Have you consideredhow our distributed warehouses might be integratedusing this solution?

Despite the differences in their words, each of these betatesters is far from pleased with the product. Think aboutthis situation for a moment, because this is simple, yetpowerful. Note in particular how the beta users in Tokyoand Bombay are both prompting John to come to his own

realization that this application is a disaster. Saying sodirectly would cause John to lose face, so they will avoidthis at all cost. But they are still being honest in theiropinions. If John in San Jose does not know what tolisten for, he may return a scorecard that says theapplication is seen as favorable by 60 percent of the betatesters. If John knows what to listen for, he can tell hisbosses that they need to start from scratch.

Erik Granered has over fifteen years experience managingstrategic communication and learning for private businessesand organizations. As a former course developer and trainerfor WorldCom’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa)customer service operations, he pioneered two unique trainingprograms in cross-cultural communication and call centermanagement specifically targeted at global call centeroperations. Currently, he is a consultant at CorporateUniversity Enterprise, Inc., an educational consulting firm inFalls Church, Virginia.

To order Erik Granered’s book Global Call Centers, pleasecall 866-372-2665 or visit: www.interculturalpress.com.


So, in the face of change, Oracle launched MetaLink, its customersupport portal. Since that time, new service request volume hasbeen cut in half, headcount has fallen, and margins haveincreased. Over 90 percent of service requests are now loggedover the Internet. Customer satisfaction scores and licencerenewal rates have increased.

A major contributor to this transformation is the knowledgebase,the Support Unified Repository (SURe). The first SURe article wascreated in March 1989. Over the years, over 400,000 articleshave been created by support engineers and developers, orimported from other sources. Two hundred forty-six thousand ofthose articles exist in the current knowedgebase, and 172,000 ofthem are directly visible to customers through MetaLink.

How is the Knowledgebase Populated?

In the early days, articles were written by a smallnumber of engineers who loved to immersethemselves in the intricacies of their chosen

product and then share their knowledge with thesupport community. Many of these articles wereimmensely valuable and after many revisions, stillprovide considerable value today. However, there wereoften gaps in the knowledgebase which this approachdidn’t always fill.

Root cause/corrective action was born, an initiative thatcreated analysis teams to analyze closely related servicerequests. Analysis resulted in actions, for example,feedback to product development for enhancements orknowledgebase actions to be implemented by theircompanion content teams. Analysis and content teammembers are service engineers who spend the majorityof their time working customer incidents. This ensuresthat the teams remain in tune with customer issues.

LEVERAGINGSUPPORTKNOWLEDGE

by Jeff Warren

In the mid-1990s, Oracle support was mainly phone-based, with new incident

volume growing at 15 percent per year. Licence sales and product complexity

increased year after year. The number of new service requests reached

2 million per year and change became inevitable.

Announcing Knova SoftwareThe New Standard for Service Resolution Management

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Learn more, read the free white paper“Best Practices in Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS)” www.knova.com/whitepapers/sw

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At the start of 2001, Oracle rolled out KnowledgeCentered Support (KCS). With ‘Capture, Structure,Deliver’ at its heart, KCS requires engineers to either linkservice requests to existing articles, or create new articleswhere none previously existed.

At the Consortium for Service Innovation, the chiefadvocate of KCS admits, “We know from experiencethat 80 percent of what is in the knowledgebase willnever be reused, 20 percent of what is in theknowledgebase will be reused, and some of that 20percent will be reused a lot.”

The problem with the 80 percent is that it creates ‘noise’when searching the knowledgebase, cluttering resultslists with unwanted solutions, making it difficult forusers to find the content they need.

Oracle now allows engineers to exercise judgement onwhen to create. The message is “only create when theproblem is likely to affect other customers in the future.”

Oracle is backing this up by developing automatedtechniques to identify clusters of related service requestswhere no content exists, so that they can identifyknowledge gaps that the revised KCS strategy misses.

While KCS is effective at capturing knowledge in theworkflow by providing just-in time (JIT) solutions, itdoesn’t address the customer need for more comprehensivearticles that explore the technical complexities of products,their features, and functions. The Oracle knowledgebasecontains a rich diversity of article types including technicalbulletins, white papers, troubleshooting guides, frequentlyasked questions (FAQs), diagnostic scripts, sample codearticles, and more. These articles are created by contentteams, product development, and the support diagnosticsand tools group.

While technical bulletins, white papers, troubleshootingguides, and FAQs only account for 11 percent of thecustomer visible articles in the knowledgebase, theyaccount for 39 percent of the MetaLink pageviews. 1919


This contrasts with KCS articles which account for 69percent of the customer visible articles, but only 40percent of the pageviews.

It is important to maintain a balance between workflowcontent creation and its consolidation into in-depthcontent. This is an area in which the work of the contentteams is vital.

Multiple Paths to Knowledge Customers reach articles by a variety of different routes,resulting in 51.8 million MetaLink knowledgebasepageviews in the last year.

By far, the most common method of accessing content isby searching. MetaLink provides a basic and an advancedsearch. The advanced option enables customers to selectfrom a variety of sources, including archivedknowledgebase articles, MetaLink forums and the defectdatabase. In the past year, customers conducted 46.9million MetaLink searches. These are supplemented byan automated search that is triggered during the loggingof a service request.

As an alternative to searching, over 400 knowledgebrowser product pages allow customers to sort, browse,filter, and search selected areas of interest. Theknowledgebase is highly structured and these pages,which are in reality JavaScript applications, provide ahighly selective way to retrieve information.

MetaLink My Headlines provides proactive notificationof new and updated articles in the knowledgebase. MyHeadlines can be configured to send e-mail notificationson selected products with the ability to include News &Notes, knowledgebase, forum, service request, defect,patch, and product lifecycle information.

Moving Customers to the WebIn the early days, Oracle used a variety of strategies to movecustomers from the phone to the Web. Every time a customerphoned to log a service request, engineers explained thebenefits of Internet support and talked the customer throughthe process of logging their incident using MetaLink.Customers were quick to see the advantages. Waiting inphone queues became a thing of the past.

As customers transitioned to using MetaLink for loggingand updating their service requests, support engineersexplained to them the advantages of searching theknowledgebase. Customers could resolve their own issues,learn how to fully exploit the features and functionality oftheir products, and benefit from the accumulatedknowledge of the Oracle support organization.

What Next?My Configs & Projects is an extention to MetaLink thatis in the early phases of deployment. A support agentautomatically collects database, eBusiness suite, andsystem data items as well as parameters and tables, andstores these in a configuration repository. Initially, the datawill be used for configuration management. Customerswill also have the ability to run healthchecks. These aredynamically generated reports that provide immediatefeedback and recommendations on potential issues.

In the future, having the knowledge of customerconfigurations and projects will allow Oracle to identifypotential problems and notify customers before theyoccur. This service will be delivered by a combination ofsupport knowledge, customer configurations, and rules.

The product support landscape will look very different inten years. However, product support will, as always,leverage the collective experiences of our customers asencapsulated in the support knowledgebase.

Jeff Warren is a senior manager within Global ProductSupport at Oracle. He leads a team of knowledge advocateswho work with product support managers, content teams, andservice engineers to ensure effective and timely knowledgecreation, externalization, and ongoing maintenance. Jeff has aparticular interest in measures of knowledgebase health andoptimizing return on investment. To learn more about productsupport at Oracle, visit www.oracle.com/support where youcan sample one of the Internet Seminars.


HDAAyanna Adams

Paul AiutoSean Allen

David AndersonTricia AngusJose Arce

Kathy ArmoltJohn AstlefordMarion Autry

Bob BaerRyan Balsick

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Patrice Baxter-WalkerEarl BazemoreAdam BeginToni Beliso

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Jill Clary-RoweSteve Claude

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Vincent HarrisJeffrey Hayes

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HDI congratulates all of the candidates who have passed theirHDI certification tests in February and March 2005!

Denver

HDISM UniversityA Professional Certification & Training Event

Join us in Mile High for the industry’s leading certification& training event for IT service & support professionals.

HDI Certification is the world’s most prestigious soft skills certification for service and support professionals.Standards-based and internationally recognized, HDI Certification is unrivalled in its industry acceptance.

HDI also offers a wide variety of valuable, timely, exciting and fun professional education offeringsfor every level of IT service and support professionals.

Hotel Reservations: A special room rate of $139.00 has been secured for conference participants. Make your reservations by calling (800) 525-2888and reference HDI. Rooms will be held at this rate until June 24, 2005 (or until sold out) and will be based upon availability after this date.

J HDI Help Desk Analyst (HDA) Boot Camp J HDI Help Desk Manager (HDM)J HDI Support Center Certification (SCC) Program J New! HDI Support Center Leadership (SCLP) ProgramJ Understanding Performance Metrics

J Introduction to Project ManagementJ Developing and Maintaining Effective Service

Level ManagementJ Knowledge Management Foundations Workshop:

The KCSSM Principles

Denver, CO J July 18-22, 2005 J The Warwick Denver Hotel

Get Cert i f ied . See Resul ts .

July2005

(800) 248-5667www.ThinkHDI.com


2005 Trip Report

Following two days of pre-conference sessionsfocusing on ITIL and HDI Certification, knowledgemanagement, and HDI’s new Support Center

Leadership Program, HDI 2005 officially kicked off withthe pounding music of Sting as two Cirque du Solielperformers swung, swirled, and flew across the generalsession stage with unbelievable grace and strength.

HDI founder and CEO Ron Muns then took the stage togreet attendees and make his first prediction at theconference. “There are now 2.08 million tech supportprofessionals. I predict that this year tech support will exceedprogrammers to become the largest category in IT, and willbe from now on. The focus of the world is on enablingproductivity, and that is all about help and support.”

Mary Cruse, the Chairman of the HDI Member Advisory Boardand Karen Yuen, Chair-elect then announced the winners ofthe HDI Local Chapter Excellence Awards. The Pittsburghchapter received the award for Membership Excellence, theCapital Area Washington DC chapter was honored forProgramming and Web site Excellence. The Southwest Synergychapter won the Newsletter Excellence Award. The Special

Events Excellence award was won by the Austinchapter, and the Pittsburgh chapter was honoredfor Overall Excellence.

It was then time for the general session’s mainevent—a hilarious keynote presentation byDilbert creator Scott Adams, in which he sharedhis favorite cartoons and told stories aboutvarious Dilbert strips that had gotten him introuble over the years—with his formeremployer, Pac Bell, his editor, and readers.

The evening concluded with a busy reception in theExpo Hall where nearly 90 vendors of help desk, IT

service desk, and customer support solutions met withconference attendees and demoed their latest product offerings.

Day Two of the 16th Annual HDI Conference & Expoopened with a laugh from Wes Borg of Deadtroll.com,

with a frantic curmudgeon-like comedic rant about the stressfullife of a help desk analyst. He even serenaded the crowd.

The Help Desk Analyst of the Year award was presented bySophie Klossner of HDI and Katherine Spencer Lee of RobertHalf Technology. More than 100 nominations resulted in sixregional finalists, including Bisera Black of KPMG, Brian Bullof St. Paul Travelers Insurance, Dora Luz Candanosa-Salazarof the Institute of Technology, Christian Marquez of SutterHealth, Carol Mastelski of Parker Hannifin Corp., and the

More than 2,400 service and support professionals, industry expertsand technology vendors gathered at the Venetian in Las Vegas

March 6-10 for the largest HDI Conference & Expo ever.

Scott Adams


winner of the 2005 HDI Help Desk Analyst of the Yearaward—Frank Hartnagel of Progress Energy, Inc.

“Given the company I am in, this is truly an honor, commentedHartnagel, referring to his fellow finalists. “And given the scopeof this conference, this is quite humbling,” he added, lookingout into the audience of nearly 2,000 of his colleagues fromaround the world. “Without the other analysts on our team,and the chance to work together and pick each other's brains,I wouldn’t be here today.”

Techno-visionary Leo Laporte delivered the morningkeynote and identified what he perceives as the Top FiveTechnology Trends of the Next Decade:

1. Here, there everywhere, cheap and ubiquitousbandwidth, enabled by technologies such asWiMax and BPL

2. Location-based technologies such as RFID, GPSand Steve Wozniak’s new company Wheels of Zeus

3. Network-centric computing, including meshcomputing, web services, distributed processingand the notion of “the network is the computer.”

4. Security technologies such as smart cards,USB tokens, biometrics and others

5. Improved more intuitive userinterfaces, including voicerecognition and an update to the“19th century keyboard design.”

The bottom line:“Instant data everywhere,all data digitized, and thelocation of everything known.”

Following the morning’s keynote ,attendees chose from more than

25 sessions focusing on allaspects of service and support,IT customer satisfaction, servicelevel management, knowledgemanagement, tools maximization,and more.

The Expo buzzed with activity asHDI Conference attendees visitedthe nearly 90 exhibitors.

Several of the exhibiting companiesmade announcements and unveilednew products. These includedChoicePoint, which IntroducedProID Voice and Invoq Systems,Inc., which announced that thecompany was named a recipient of the HP OpenViewAchiever's Award. NLayers showcased its new DiscoverySolution. Peregrine Systems demonstrated How CMDBcan maximize the performance of IT. RightAnswersalso made several announcements and SyberfixSolutions chose HDI 2005 as the forum to launch thenews company and introduce it new software productline. The Expo Hall’s Launch Pad was the site of threeexciting announcements: MRO Software introduced anew product, Maxim Enterprise Suite. HDI’s CEO RonMuns and industry expert Sandra Simpson then madean exciting announcement—the introduction of a newbook published by HDI, Implementing Service andSupport Management Processes: A Practical Guide, theindustry’s first prescriptive guide to implementing ITInfrastructure Library (ITIL®) and other processesspecific to the IT support center environment. Finally,program director Cinda Daly announced the new ITIM2005 Conference program.

The afternoon continued with three mini-keynoteVisionary presentations: “Thinking in Future Tense”with Jennifer James, “Avoiding the Nine BiggestPresentation Mistakes” with Terri Sjodin and“Maintaining a Winning Spirit” with Ed Foreman; andthe day concluded with more than a dozen sessionsthrough an Afternoon of Discovery.

The third day of the HDI Annual Conference & Expobegan with the presentation of the HDI Internal TeamExcellence Awards, which were presented by HDI’sSophie Klossner. “These organizations represent the bestof the best,” she said as she announced the 2005 finalists:American Honda Motor Company and Verizon Wireless,and the winner, Sutter Health.

“Our staff is committed to providing exceptionalcustomer support and this award acknowledges thatcommitment,” said Laurie Lock, help desk manager forthe Sutter Health network of hospitals and physicians.

p Report

Wes Borg

Leo Laporte

H D I 2 0 0 5 T R I P R E P O R T


“It’s also a reflection of our team’s pride in working forSutter Health, an organization that recognizes the vitalrole information technology plays in advancing quality inhealth care. We’re very honored.”

Tim Sanders, Yahoo’s leadership coach delivered amemorable, moving and sometimes chilling keynote.Sharing many, many funny, sad, remarkable andfrightening anecdotes, Sanders drove home the powerand importance of being likeable or having “a high L-factor,” as he puts it, which he defines as your capabilityto produce positive emotional responses in people whichthey reciprocate by liking you. “We have a cancer in theworld of IT,” stated Sanders. “It’s killing our teams and it’skilling our people. The problem is we need to do somuch more with so much less and it’screating a very negative outlook.”

“Unlikeability doesn’t work but it’sextremely easy to change if you care. Idream of a more likeable world,” saidSanders. “Long after people forgetwhat you did, they will never forgethow you made them feel.”

The morning’s breakout sessionsfocused on topics such as ITIL, globalIT organizations, disaster recovery, self-service, tool selection, and off-shoringof support.

The Discovery Zone was filled with HDI Conferenceattendees as they perused the aisles of vendors, and at theexpo stage, the Launch Pad featured two announcementsfrom HDI: the updated standards for HDI’s Support CenterCertification program, and an update from HDI, CompTIA,and Microsoft on how the three leading certification

bodies will collaborate to deliver a comprehensiveapproach to certification for tech support professionals.

The afternoon’s Visionary keynotes featured a state-of-theindustry address from HDI founder and CEO Ron Muns.

“IT service and support professionals’ roles andresponsibilities have changed significantly over the lastfew years. The industry is more process-focused and isworking toward common best practices,” said Muns.Overall, the industry trend this year seems to be towardempowering the customer, with an increasing number oforganizations providing self-help technologies, allowingdirect customer input and the ability to query the calltracking (service management) systems. Also, self-diagnostictool usage is increasing at a significantrate. With regard to outsourcing, HDIcontinued to find a lot of churn, withsome organizations outsourcing whileothers are bringing service back in-house,but overall, HDI found that morecompanies are outsourcing some or allof their support center activities. TheSarbanes-Oxley Act has been a major issueand has caused many IT organizations tofocus on process improvement. Indicators ofthis are the increasing number of individuals andsupport organizations choosing to be certified and

increasing interest in ITIL (ITInfrastructure Library) framework,COBIT, Six Sigma, and, in general, inadopting and documenting best practicesfor IT and IT support operations.

The day’s education concluded withmore than a dozen sessions on bestpractices, metrics, and marketing yoursupport center.

On the eve of the last day of theconference, HDI threw a party featuringan exclusive engagement with worldrenowned comedian and host of the

Tonight Show, the loveable and hysterical Jay Leno!

The evening began with a cocktail reception, followed bythe opening act with comedian magician, Mac King.Then, HDI 2005 attendees enjoyed a very special eveningof comedy with Jay Leno!

Tim Sanders

T R I P R E P O R T


Following the most exciting HDI conference party ever,the last day of HDI 2005 offered attendees two dozenbreakout sessions on topics such as Web self-service,extended provisioning, peer support, metrics, bringingoutsourced support back in-house, and the futureof mobility.

The Executive Discovers met at breakfast to discuss ITgovernance; the last session of No SPLAT! Zoneparticipants met to discuss how to take their ideas andlearnings back to their support organizations; and eachof the Vertical Visions groups met for their wrap-up“Open Door” sessions.

In the final general session, the 2005 HDI Team ExcellenceAward for External Support was presented to CompuCom.Finalists for the sought-after award includedFidelity Info. Services,and Trend Micro.

“We at CompuCom are honored to receive the 2005 HDITeam Excellence Award for External Support. Given therigorous criteria by which candidates are reviewed, thisaward is a testament of our dedication to quality and ourpursuit of excellence in client satisfaction. We respectfullythank our clients, our help desk team, and the HDIjudges,” said John McKenna, senior vice president ofServices, CompuCom.

The final keynote was presented by artist and innovator,Erik Wahl, who shared “The Art of the Vision” with HDI2005 attendees, using his spectacular paintings as avisual metaphor to create a vision for success strategies!

Jay Leno

Erik Wahl

See You Next Year in

Nashville, Tennesseeat the

Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Resort

March 19th – 22nd, 2006


Internal Team Excellence AwardSutter HealthSutter Health is a family of not-for-profit hospitals, physicianorganizations, and other medical services that share resourcesand expertise to advance health care quality. Serving more than100 communities in Northern California, Sutter Health is aregional leader in cardiac care, cancer treatment, orthopedics,obstetrics, and newborn intensive care, and is a pioneer inadvanced patient safety technology. For more information, visitwww.sutterhealth.org.

“Our staff is committed to providing exceptional customer support andthis award acknowledges that commitment,” said Laurie Lock, help deskmanager for the Sutter Health network of hospitals and physicians. “It’salso a reflection of our team’s pride in working for Sutter Health, anorganization that recognizes the vital role information technology playsin advancing quality in health care. We’re very honored.”

External Team Excellence AwardCompuComCompuCom (www.compucom.com), headquartered in Dallas,Texas, is a North American leader in providing multi-vendor,comprehensive IT infrastructure solutions. These serviceofferings are incorporated in a unique Integrated InfrastructureManagement model that supports the entire IT lifecycle. TheCompuCom service portfolio provides remote helpdesk, NOC,and onsite services, as well as a full range of professional servicesfocused on IT infrastructure, asset management, enterprisesystems, and network solutions. CompuCom has clients fromFortune 1000 enterprises that are supported by sales and servicedelivery capabilities in major U.S. and Canadian markets.

“We at CompuCom are honored to receive the 2005 HDI Team ExcellenceAward for External Support. Given the rigorous criteria by whichcandidates are reviewed, this award is a testament of our dedication toquality and our pursuit of excellence in client satisfaction. We respectfullythank our clients, our help desk team, and the HDI judges,” saidJohn McKenna, senior vice president of Services, CompuCom.

Team Excellence Award WinnersHDI’s Team Excellence Award is the gold medal of the service and support profession. This award recognizesthe two teams that have most enhanced the image of the support services profession by setting and achievingthe highest standards of excellence. Final judging for these awards takes place at HDI’s Annual Conference &Expo and consists of one-on-one interviews with the top three finalists in both categories.

**Look for comprehensive company profiles on these awardwinning teams in upcoming editions of SupportWorld.

Sutter HealthInternal Team Excellence Award Winner

Frank Hartnagel2005 Analyst of the Year Award Winner

CompuComExternal Team Excellence Award Winner

Help Desk Analyst of the Year Award 2005Sponsored by Robert Half TechnologyHDI’s Analyst of the Year Award program recognizes the world’sbest frontline analysts. The award process begins at the locallevel, where participating chapters collect and encourage awardnominations and select a local chapter winner. Local chapterwinners compete for the regional award, and regional winnersare then invited to participate in HDI’s Global Analyst of theYear Award competition, presented at the HDI Annual Conference.

Nominees, who must be HDI members, are judged oncriteria such as performance, quality of work, teamorientation, ethics, technical aptitude, problem solving skills,and leadership. Interested help desk analysts should contacttheir local HDI chapter for more information about how tobe nominated for the award. Application forms, guidelinesfor local chapters, and further information about the awardcan also be found at: www.ThinkHDI.com/membership/awards/helpdeskanalyst/.

The 2005 Analyst of the Year AwardFrank Hartnagel, Information Technology &Telecommunications, Progress Energy.

“The HDI Analyst of the Year program is one of the most worthwhileevents ever created for our industry. The sheer size, scope, andpageantry of the ceremony, plus the accolades I received from mypeers during the remainder of the convention made that week at theVenetian Resort in Las Vegas one I will never forget.”

—Frank Hartnagel

2005 Local Chapter Excellence Award WinnersThe HDI Local Chapter Excellence Awards acknowledge thesuperior performance of HDI’s local chapters and provide abenchmark for local chapters to benefit from and emulate. Thesechapters excel in one or more of the following areas:

Overall ExcellencePittsburgh Service &Support Professionals

Membership ExcellencePittsburgh Service &Support Professionals

Program ExcellenceCapital Area Washington DC

Newsletter ExcellenceSouthwest Synergy

Special Events ExcellenceAustin

Web Site ExcellenceCapital Area Washington DC

We invite you to join 7500+ fellow members worldwide fromthe IT service and support community. In addition toSupportWorld, HDI offers other up-to-the-minute publications,industry reports, professional education and networkingopportunities – available both online and through exclusive andvertically-focused face-to-face forums – HDI gives you valuableinformation, knowledge and the opportunity to connect withthousands of colleagues around the world.

z Members-only Website Access, including access towhitepapers, case studies, industry reports, online-forums, and more!

z SupportWorld – 6 issues z HDI’s quarterly Focus Book seriesz The HDI Annual Practices and Salary Surveysz HDI’s new Metric Guide series – 6 issuesz HDI Local Chapter membership in one of HDI’s 60 North

American local chapters z SPIN: an online Support Professional Information Network portal

for a series of live, interactive, educational web seminarsz Discounts on HDI’s conferences, certification training, and

HDI’s e-Store

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The role of e-learning in the contact center/help desk e-Learning is the use of information and communicationstechnologies to create and maximize the learningenvironment and experience. It is particularly effective inteaching skills; such as how to use a software product,because of its ability to have the learner practice thefunctions. Help desks also use e-learning to teachconcepts, such as policies, procedures, and regulatoryissues relevant to the market they serve or soft skills suchas dealing with difficult customers. E-learning is effectivein providing training to new hires, refresher training forexisting employees, and upgrade training to build on theexisting knowledgebase.

What makes e-learning such a solid fit for contact centersand help desks? It addresses some very specific issues andchallenges of their environment. Agent turnover, forexample, is a matter that centers have learned to live with,accepting a churn rate as high as 15-20 percent. Thisattrition means training of new agents is constant. Today’scenters often cannot spare anyone to train new agents withclassroom-style training. e-Learning enables the provision ofdetailed tutorials and training in an interactive format. Somestudies by research analysts also found a correlation betweentraining and staff retention and that the implementation ofe-learning can reduce churn to less than 10 percent.

Well-trained staff also handle calls more efficiently, reducingtime and costs for calls. e-Learning as a training tool becomes

of particular interest in centers where up-selling and cross-selling are part of the agent’s role. It is typical for agents topromote only the few products he/she is familiar with andherein lies the limitation of traditional training methods. Thesemethods take too much time for a center to provide in-depthtraining on more than a few options. The use of e-learningtechnology makes it possible for agents to increase theircomfort levels with a greater range of products and services.

Features of today’s e-learninge-Learning technology addresses the gaps left by othertraining methods:

Just in time (JIT) capability provides the agent withimmediate access to information about product andservices portfolios. It turns the training into a help desk,where agents can search for specific information fairlyquickly—even while on a call.

The implementation of e-learning provides agents with theability to train anywhere, anytime. Allowing agents to trainduring downtime or slower call volumes maximizes theireffectiveness and allows them to consolidate what they havelearned through use and practice. e-Learning can be deliveredright to the agent’s desktop or to their home or mobile laptop,for contact centers with staff working from remote locations.

The addition of simulation to skills-based training allowsagents to practice the required skill set before they deal with


e-Learning for theContact Center

One of the greatest growth areas for e-learning is the contact center/help desk market, and with reason. The drive for improved customer service,cost reduction, and revenue generation means that easy, continuous accessto training is necessary. Once the domain of only larger organizations,e-learning technology is evolving to become more accessible to the small andmedium-sized centers.

by Robert Koblovsky, CEO, Smart Telecom

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a real customer. Simulation in the learning environment isthe fastest path to competency, providing agents with theability to work in a “safe” environment while emulating thetasks required in a “live” or “production mode.”

Administration features enable the contact centermanager to track how the agents are doing in theirtraining and allows the manager to administer, test, andreport on training throughout the contact center group.

The implementation of e-learning Successful implementation of e-learning requirescareful planning. Although it is easy to get caught up inthe exciting, comprehensive features that are available,the focus should be on the specific learning needs ofthe contact center where it will be implemented. Startby defining these needs, reviewing factors such asagent turnover, training of new agents versusestablished agents, customer service requirements,corporate policies, and revenue goals. Assess existingtraining materials and determine whether they can beadapted or need to be updated. Identify what type oftraining best meets the needs and how frequently it willneed to be updated. Look at timing and set short- andlong-term objectives. Don’t forget to consider budgetsand the availability of other resources in thedevelopment of training content. Establish benchmarkswhich will provide a before and after comparison andROI measure.

e-Learning is strategic in nature and requires executiveinvolvement and commitment to be successful. Contentis not static nor is the evolution of technology. Aslearning requirements change and technologies mature,the e-learning environment will change to embrace newcapabilities and processes.

The challenge is that various technologies encompassed bye-learning are maturing at different rates. For example,Learning Management Systems (LMS) are reasonably maturewhile Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) arestill emerging. Both of these enable organizations toadminister and manage training. Large companies may havethese in place and the training for contact centers will needto comply with them. Fortunately, industry standards suchas AICC and SCORM promote interoperability standardsand specifications for e-learning.

It is unlikely that any one approach or tool (or set oftools) will address all of the e-learning requirements of anentire organization; the development platform andapproach used by corporate for general training may notbe transportable to the needs of the contact center.

The good news is that the newer e-learning technologiesare making it accessible to the small to medium-sizedcenters and help desks. The upfront investment is moremanageable—particularly if the solution is simplyfocused on the learning needs. (Video, multimedia or

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other lively features are great, but they are also expensiveand may not help in better teaching the subject matter.)They are also more flexible in enabling change to content,and therefore, increasing the life span of the tutorials.

Creating e-learning coursesIn any e-learning environment content is king. Theeffectiveness of an e-learning program depends upon thecreation of a learning environment that facilitates andsupports the target user’s ability to access relevantcontent, display the information in such a way that theuser understands and allows for consolidation oflearning, maximizing retention, and recall.

Typically, training should be modular. This allows forusers to train anywhere, anytime without the need tocomplete lengthy training modules. It also recognizes thatlearning is more effective if presented in smaller chunks.

Positive feedback mechanisms implemented throughoutthe training program re-enforce the learning experience.It is unfortunate but true that few organizations take thetime to understand how their employees learn. Simplethings such as age and sex affect learning, as do otherhuman factors which need to be evaluated.

One of the challenges in implementing e-learning is thatmany adults are resistant to change—and thereforetraining—because of reasons such as resenting theimplication that they don’t know how to do their jobs, they

are wary of computers, feel they are too old or set in theirways to learn new things, fear of job stability, etc. And, sofirst and foremost, e-learning needs to be presented in anon-threatening way that positively promotes its use.

The second challenge in applying e-learning is thedifferent learning styles that have to be taken intoaccount so that it is absorbed and effective. Consider forexample an inbound call center in the automotiveindustry that provides access to Class “A” mechanics forspecialized support. These agents are generally older,blue collar males. There are also other customer servicerepresentatives (CSRs) handling general inquiries withinthe same contact center. These are generally female, mid-thirties, with college educations. Training must take intoaccount how differently each of these groups learns.

Testing measures what the agents have learned and it isan integral part of an e-learning tutorial. There arevarious testing methodologies available: true or false,essay, and task based. The training manager can definethe minimum competency levels and track agentprogress. Monitoring responses is necessary, particularlyfor new courses. If many people get the same answerwrong, either the question is incorrect or the presentationof the material is not clear.

e-Learning adoption will continue to growIt is clear that more and more contact centers and helpdesks will implement e-learning, particularly astechnology makes it more accessible and cost-friendly.Employers have already overcome the first hurdle with theacceptance that staff training is imperative to continuedgrowth, success, and customer satisfaction. The nextchallenge is to create effective, goal-oriented, e-learningcourseware. To do this, research and identification of thecall center’s training needs and goals are essential first stepsin creating a plan.

There is no doubt that e-learning provides tangiblebenefits and measurable results for the contact center.The success of your e-learning initiatives will bedependant upon the degree of effort and seniormanagement commitment to the task at hand.

Robert Koblovsky has over 29 years of experience in thetelecommunications and software industries and has held severalsenior management positions in leading companies. Most recentlyas Vice President, Sales, and Marketing of Data Kinetics Ltd.,Mr. Koblovsky successfully managed the company’s Software andEducation divisions and was instrumental in revamping theuncertain Education division and turned it around into a viableand thriving business. Mr. Koblovsky speaks regularly atnumerous industry specific conferences and events throughout theU.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia. He has published articles intrade and industry journals and has been a quotable reference formany journals and newspapers throughout North America. Mr.Koblovsky holds a Bachelor of Behavioural Psychology fromLakehead University.

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by Jim McKennan

Jim McKennan, aka Dr. Jim the service doctor,

is often recognized for his highly developed

customer service skills as well as being an adept

call center professional, speaker, and award

winning sales and IT professional. He is a senior

consultant with Pink Elephant. Jim is a member

of the Sacramento, CA chapter of HDI and

is currently the chapter VP of quality and

excellence. Jim has been elected as the western

region director of the HDISM Member Advisory

Board. He has a BA in psychology from California

State University.

Dear Dr. Jim,I work at the service desk in my company. I feel theservice desk staff does a pretty good job providingexcellent customer service and I think the customers aresatisfied. But, when we escalate a case to one of thesecond level support groups, I don’t believe they aredoing as good a job satisfying the customers as theservice desk. What can we do to show the second levelgroups how to improve their customer service?

Flustered in Phoenix.

Dear Flustered, This phenomenon seems to be fairly common in myexperience. Customer service training is usually anintegral part of the training and skill set for service deskpersonnel, but it is less common for the other technicalpersonnel within an IT organization to spend any timeimproving these skills. I believe some IT managers thinkthat highly developed technical skills are sufficientenough for their staff. If any customer service training isprovided, it is not deemed as important.

It is good that you are taking ownership of the servicerelationship with your internal customers, but it may notbe easy to accomplish what you want. The first problemis that the second level personnel might report to adifferent manager than you and this could limit yourinfluence. You may have to work in conjunction withyour manager to achieve your goal. Secondly, your“belief” that the second level support staff is not doing agood job satisfying customers might not be enough. Alittle homework may help your cause.

Have you conducted any customer surveys lately? Havethe results pointed out a need for improving the serviceskills of the second level groups? If there has not been

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any hard evidence of this, you may need to develop asurvey to uncover this. If this is not practical, the servicedesk may want to interview a number of your keycustomer groups to get some clear mandate that thisskills improvement is warranted.

Aside from that, I would ask myself a rhetoricalquestion, “Is having ‘satisfied’ customers enough?” Theanswer should be “no.” Having satisfied customers isnot enough. Most people have pretty low expectationswhen it comes to service. So low that being satisfiedusually means accepting mediocrity. If your companyunderstands this, I’m sure they will not want to bedelivering mediocrity.

I highly recommend a great book about customer serviceentitled Raving Fans, by Ken Blanchard and SheldonBowles. It is a short and easy read—you can probably readthe entire book in just a couple of hours. It delivers apowerful message about giving service. See if your servicedesk budget will allow you to purchase several copies andthen have your manager read it and share it with the otherIT managers. This may be the spark that allows you tohelp them start to improve their service delivery.

One of the main points made in the book is that in orderto create “raving fans” (instead of just satisfied customers),you need to deliver the expected service “plus onepercent.” That simply means that even though you mayhave a service level agreement that defines your servicedelivery, you really need to go just a little beyond whatthe customer expects. How do we translate those wordsinto action? Let me give you a few everyday examples.

Let’s say that the service desk escalates an incident toone of the desktop technicians. When the techniciangoes out to visit the user at his desk, she diagnoses theproblem and fixes it. That normally would be the endof this transaction. But what if in the course of fixingthe reported incident, the technician also notices thatthe user’s PC is running a little slower than a PC of thistype should? This was not reported, but the technicianknows that she can take further action that willimprove the processing speed of this PC by simplyinitiating a quick, simple procedure. The user may beso used to the slow speed that he never even noticed itwas running slowly. But, once the second procedure iscompleted, he may say, “Wow, you really made thisthing rock! Thanks for taking the extra step to makemy life easier.”

A Telecom technician may be called upon to service atelephone that is not working properly. Once the phoneis fixed, it would be easy for the technician to do some

preventive maintenance and clean the phone. This extraservice would only take a few extra minutes but would goa long way toward changing the perception of thecustomer about IT service.

Other second level technical groups can also “deliver thevision plus one percent.” The key to doing this is to lookat what the customer has requested and determine whatwould be the next logical step beyond what wasrequested. Then deliver what was expected plus the nextlogical step. This is the way to change a satisfiedcustomer into a “raving fan.” Isn’t a raving fan better thana satisfied customer?

Once the idea of delivering better service is accepted inyour IT organization, your assistance will be morewelcomed.

The bottom line is that delivering outstanding servicerather than mediocre service will not take place unlessquality is important to your company and your ITdepartment. So, you may need help in getting this way ofthinking more widely accepted by setting a good exampleand talking about quality every chance you have. Otherlike-minded people will eventually chime in and beforeyou know it, you will have a “quality revolution.” Beingthe leader of that kind of revolution will give you thekind of positive exposure that will help your career. Don’tshy away. Embrace the opportunity! Good luck.

Correction: In the last Dr. Jim article, Dr. Jim wasexplaining how a Desktop Technician could assist acustomer with the following sentence: “This may includetraining on how to perform certain tasks, showing them anyexisting documentation, showing them how to use any self-help tools or knowledgebase available, showing them how toperform maintenance on their PC, showing them how to re-image the hard drive, or recommending other ways to dothings to reduce contacts to the service desk.”

The sentence should have read: “This may includetraining on how to perform certain tasks, showing them anyexisting documentation, showing them how to use any self-help tools or knowledgebase available, doing maintenance ontheir PC, re-imaging the hard drive or recommending otherways to reduce contacts to the service desk.”

We regret any confusion. —Editor.

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www.ThinkHDI.com36

Highly SuccessfulHiring Managers

by Allison GrossVice President,

Comforce Corporation

So, you manage a support center.Or, you’re responsible for its

Human Resources department.

It’s a great job—if only you didn’thave to deal with people—right?

But you do have to deal with people…every day of your life. In many cases,

they are the people whom you’ve hired;and, often, the dealings are less than

comfortable. So what does that tell youabout your hiring practices?

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While most call centers would recognize thatfinding good people should be a primary goal,the business of running the day-to-day

operations seems to often get in the way. I’m alwayssurprised that many call centers choose to run one of theirmost important tasks—finding good people—like a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation.

It’s a short-term, very narrow outlook. And if you do it thatway, it’s hurting your profits.

You must have a hiring plan in place. At the very least, itshould have an accurate set of job descriptions, educationaland work-experience requirements, and any other job-specific requirements. This is the baseline; without this youcannot accurately judge whether a candidate is qualified toproceed through the interview and testing process.

Do you test for technical and customer-service skills? Whynot? If you do, are you sure that you’re using validassessment tests which relate to the job? A validated test, tobe reliable, must be constructed properly…and good testconstruction is usually the result of qualified test developers,psychologists, etc. Most reputable testing companies canprovide validated results to show how reliable their testshave been in forecasting whether a candidate is qualified,from a technical or customer-service standpoint.

Keep in mind that creating reliable tests definitely takesboth time and money; but this is definitely one place whereyou shouldn’t try and do it on the cheap. If you try to cutcorners, you’ll probably get—much to your eventualchagrin—exactly what you paid for.

Do you create an interview process with set questions thatcan be used as a springboard for more in-depth questioning?

Do you require drug testing and background investigationsto finalize the hiring process?

There are several specific things that successful managersare doing to enhance their hiring programs. Taking a pagefrom Stephen Covey (“Seven Habits of Highly SuccessfulPeople”), I like to call them the Five Habits of SuccessfulHiring Managers.

Habit 1: Since your people will be spending practically allof their time on the phone, the first time you interviewthem…it should be on the phone(!). If your companyimage is dependent on the impressions made by yourcustomer service reps, help desk personnel, etc., youshould have the candidate first make a phone-impression(or not) on you. Does she come off as well-spoken,professional, and competent?

Also, use this as an opportunity to get some of the basics outof the way before you bring them in for Step Two. And—empty seats or not—don’t ignore any red flags on theirresume! This practice can really come back to bite you.

w Gaps in employment may tell you something. Soask about them! Verify month and date of hire andtermination for each job. Many candidates onlyput down year-begin and end dates. This leaves itwide open for someone who was not working forseveral months.

w Another red flag: If the candidate has bouncedaround from one job to another. In actuality, theremight be good reasons for it. But you’ll never find outunless you ask. Too many unexplained moves mightindicate a lack of commitment or something worse.

Habit 2: If they pass the phone interview, make sure thenext couple of steps include some simple “tasks.” Forinstance, ask the candidate to bring in another copy of hisresume. Make sure they know to bring three businessreferences, with phone numbers and addresses. If yourequire an online test, have them do it prior to the interview.

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Highly SuccessfulHiring Managers

Ours is probably the only industry where managers are happy with “only” a 35 percent turnover! Someforward-thinking centers have, to their credit, instituted retention programs. Yet, most of us still haven’t takensteps to nip this problem where it starts—before the hiring. It’s quite simple, really. You have to hire the rightpeople to begin with. After all, you can’t keep good people if you don’t have good people to start with. Itrequires a commitment to realize one simple truth. The goal here is not just filling up seats…but filling themup with good people. People who will produce. And people who will stay.


Are these perfect indicators of whether or not the personwill do the job? No. But they are perfect indicators ofwhether he can follow some very simple directions. If acandidate can’t comply with your directions whenlooking for a job, then why would they follow your workpolicies and procedures when on board? This should be(but often isn’t) a “no-brainer.” If the candidate does notdo exactly as you asked, then don’t go any further.

Remember—you need to operate (and this bears plentyof repeating) from a position of strength (even if you’renot in one!). Don’t be desperate! Don’t—repeat, don’t—make the all-too-common mistake of thinking that awarm body in a seat is better than no body at all. In thereal world, a warm body generally ends up being farmore costly than no body at all.

Another tip: When a candidate fills out an application,note how long it takes. You should have a fairly good ideaof how long some of your better past candidates took tofill out the same application. This may give you someinsight as to the candidate’s ability to complete fairlysimple tasks.

Habit 3: In this day and age, multiple interviews are nolonger a luxury…they’re a “must.” You can have two ofyour people present in the same interview, or have twodifferent people do back-to-back interviews. Bothinterviewers, regardless of the format, must take detailednotes. Often, when they compare their notes later, it’samazing which candidates “shake out.” (Of course, italways helps to make sure both interviewers areexperienced themselves—and that they understand therequirements of the position being interviewed for.)

Habit 4: “Pre-orientation”: This really should be astandard practice for effective interviewing. In fact, it’sone of the first things you should do—probably, infact, during the phone interview—because if theanswers to these questions aren’t satisfactory, you neednot go any further. However, you’d be surprised howoften it’s overlooked.

Following are some examples of a pre-orientation:

w Do they have reliable transportation?

w Can they work the hours? Can they meet yourtraining schedule, and then the shift to whichthey’ll be assigned afterward? If you’re goingto require on-call hours, shift flexibility, orintermittent weekend work, now’s the time to sayit. There will be people who simply do not have theflexibility to meet your requirements.

w We’re in the post-9/11 era. Drug tests andbackground investigations should be standardpre-hire requirements. If you aren’t currently doing

these, you should start now; it could even save yousome legal problems down the line. If the candidateindicates a problem may occur, it’s time to move on.

Habit 5: Another “obvious”—which, in our desperationto fill seats, many of us still don’t do—is the referencecheck. Never—ever—attempt to save time by skippingthis step. In the real world, many a company has saveditself considerable time (as well as money) by actuallydoing this step.

It’s a fact of life today; many people do lie on theirapplications and resumes (including, as we’ve seen overthe past few years, many well-known people).

In addition, because of today’s litigious environment,many companies for whom the applicant previouslyworked will provide only dates of service, job title, andverification as to whether the employee is “eligible forrehire.” But you can go a step further. You can ask for awritten release from the candidate, which would allowyou to get a more detailed written reference from a prioremployer. (And if you can’t get a release from them, youprobably don’t have to bother asking anything else.)

As simple as most of these steps are, we see—on a dailybasis—that many centers just don’t do them.

However, you also intuitively know that a good hire willincrease productivity and save money over the long haul.So, when it comes to installing a quality hiring process,don’t scrimp! Hiring right will, in turn, allow yourretention program a chance to work…and the benefitswill continue to cascade.

Lastly, if you truly don’t have the time, you might want toseriously consider finding an experienced staffing partnerto do all these things for you. Hiring an expert allows youto focus on your core competency—running a call center.

In summation, let me be very blunt: Stop throwinganybody with a pulse into your call center seats! It justdoesn’t work!

How will you know that your new program is working?Simple. Your customers will tell you.

Allison Gross is a Vice President with Comforce Corporation(www.comforce.com), a $450 million public companyinvolved in consulting and staffing for the call center industry.Based in Atlanta, GA, she works closely with major callcenters all over the country. Allison Gross can be reached at(678) 812-2234, or at [email protected].

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Virtually anythingis possible...

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October 2 - 5, 2005Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center • Orlando, Florida

Building, Managing & Integrating the Infrastructure of Tomorrow

The premier conference and expo for builders and managers of IT infrastructure

Ray KurzweilInventor

How Far Will TechnologyTransform Humanity?

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The Art of the Start

Robert CringelyTechnology Futurist

The Microsoft Century

Jamie ClarkEverest Adventurer

Above All Else

Steve RizzoThe Humor Being

Embracing Change

Produced by


Rethinking SupportProgressively complex and distributed computerhardware, software applications, and networkenvironments are being deployed to operate businesscritical processes. A study from Yankee Group hasestimated that banks can lose as much as U.S. $2.6million per hour and brokerages as much as U.S. $4.5million, from downtime. Unfortunately, corporatesupport desks required to maintain the infrastructurehave not seen an increase in budget commensuratewith increased infrastructure complexity. To solve thisproblem, there is a growing trend to see the entiretechnical infrastructure become self-correcting—transferring the burden and expense of maintaining thetechnology infrastructure to the infrastructure itself.

Our reliance on technology has never been greater. Criticalbusiness operations, transactions, and communications occurthrough a technical infrastructure that has become increasinglycomplex and distributed. Growing reliance on computersoftware, hardware, and networking has created an opportunityto reevaluate the manner in which infrastructure support ishandled. This article serves as a brief introduction to theemerging trend of systems that are self-aware enough todetect that there are problems, diagnose the issues, andeffect repairs—without human intervention.

by Rohit Joshi

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Industry Leading RoadmapsIndustry leading companies have begun buildingstrategies that will create self-correcting systems.Microsoft and IBM lead the pack by initiating elementalchanges to their product planning to incorporate self-aware, self-healing technology. IBM launched theirinitiative in the late 1990’s and have branded itautonomic computing. Many IBM partners have adoptedand refined the vision by contributing research articles aswell as adhering to standards developed by IBM.Microsoft revealed its strategy for infrastructuremanageability through its Dynamic Systems Initiative(DSI). Microsoft is creating standards and releasingproducts designed to enable heterogeneous systems toreceive monitored information from shrink wrappedsoftware, custom applications, hardware devices, andnetwork systems. Although the approaches are clearlydifferent, both center around the concept of hardware,software, and networking systems automaticallydetecting problems, diagnosing the issue, repairing thesystem, and logging all actions. Microsoft and IBMrecognize the need for common standards such thatinteroperability can occur among disparate systems.

Standardization of the Problem-Resolution CycleStandardization is necessary to enable software applications,operating systems, and hardware to communicate at somebasic level. In order for all of the systems to coordinate theproblem detection, diagnosis, and repair, there must be acommon communication mechanism that will enable rootcause analysis—avoiding the inevitable system-wide virtual“finger pointing.” Companies that are leading systemmanageability initiatives are looking toward common loggingformats so that the readings from one monitoring system canbe reported to another. Although this solution is far fromideal, it allows an open structure that can form an importantstepping stone to interoperability of compliant systems.

The basic components of the problem-resolution cyclerequired for self-correcting systems:

1. Monitoring—Software, hardware, and networkmonitoring requires clearly defined normaloperating tolerances. Once these are defined,device monitoring will indicate when the system isoperating out of the norm and trigger alerts.

2. Decision Making—Once the trigger has been fired,indicating system abnormality, the next step is todetermine what action is necessary, if any. Thecomplexity inherent in this stage presents the mostsignificant challenge for self-correcting systems. Theidea that computers will be able to continuouslyidentify the problematic software, hardware, ornetwork issues and automatically issue a resolutionis surely difficult to comprehend and execute.Microsoft and IBM agree that the key to the successof this stage will require comprehensive systemknowledge that will help decipher the monitoreddata and issue appropriate resolutions.

3. Resolution Delivery Workflow—The third stageof the problem-resolution cycle is the delivery ofthe resolution. Once the path to resolution hasbeen determined during the decision makingprocess, a separate set of systems is required toaffect the change. Or, in the event that aresolution cannot be automatically delivered, theappropriate workflow is initiated to alertindividuals equipped to make the change. Thisapproach lends itself to the theory that in theabsence of entirely automated problem-resolution, the concept of “human-supervised”infrastructure could be an intermediate solution.

4. Logging—The final stage of the problem-resolutionprocess is to ensure that there is a complete recordof the identified problem, resolution steps have beendecided, actions have been taken, and ultimately, theefficacy of these actions recorded.

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Support Automation—A step in the right directionSupport automation and service automation companieshave started addressing the need for self-correctingsystems by releasing products that have the ability toautomate segments of the problem-resolution cycle.Depending on the company and their product specialty;problem detection, diagnosis, resolution delivery, andlogging can be automated. These companies offer someearly indications of the trend towards automated andunmanned support. With their technology solutionsmaturing, support automation is becoming an importanttechnology stepping stone to the future of self-correcting,self healing infrastructures. Adoption of supportautomation technologies will, for the near future, be thevehicle through which many organizations can streamlinetheir support operations and see the business benefitsexpected through autonomic computing or DSI.

ConclusionIn a technical environment that continues to becomemore complex and difficult to maintain, self-correctingsystems offer considerable promise in creatinginfrastructure manageability. Downtime and associatedrevenue losses will be reduced by having the systemsself-correct—only escalating to live technical supportwhen manual intervention is required to fix the problem.The result is that the infrastructure will be able tosubstantially handle routine maintenance and wellcharacterized system problems, allowing technicians tofocus on resolving alerts generated by the system. IBMand Microsoft have recognized the need for moremanageability in the technical infrastructure and havepublished open standards to assist the drive towardsystem interoperability. Fortunately, mature products arealready available from support automation companiesthat are already significantly automating steps of theproblem-resolution cycle.

As Vice President Marketing at Control-F1, Rohit Joshi isresponsible for establishing the strategies and initiatives thatdrive the company towards achievement of its marketawareness, sales, and growth objectives. Joshi ensures thatControl-F1 products and messages create an increaseddemand and recognition for the company and its productofferings. His expertise has spanned e-learning, contentmanagement, knowledge management, and customerrelationship management. In various capacities, Joshi hasworked with the Air National Guard (USA), CP Rail, GenelexCorporation, Compaq, Microsoft, and Motorola. Over thepast 14 years, Joshi has held senior executive positions withtechnology companies in the USA and Canada.

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I had always considered working on a help desk to be a ‘job’ where theskills would not take me past my current position—until I found HDI.I have acquired new skills that have promoted my career and I owethis success to the training and certifications received from HDI.HDI Certifications have become a part of our job requirements andhave helped our staff understand that what they are building is not ajob, but a career. Thank you, HDI, for the difference you have madenot only for me, but for my company.

CHERYL BIERWORTHSupport Center Supervisor, Cox Target Media


A ccording to IBM, the zSeries was one of its fastestgrowing hardware products sustaining five straightquarters of growth. “Infused with the ability to

partition workloads (virtualization) and operate with Linux,the mainframe is showing nimbleness never seen before,”says Gordon Haff, senior analyst, Illuminata Inc. Even IBMCEO, Sal Palmisano, praised the growth of the mainframeand cited continuing demand for the platform as businessesbuild their on-demand infrastructures and move towardserver consolidation, two of IBM’s biggest initiatives. 1

It is the E-Business ‘On-Demand’ Movement, largelychampioned by IBM that has spurred the latest growthmovement on the part of mainframes. ‘On-Demand’ is aboutflexibility, responsiveness to changing market conditions,exploiting new applications, better serving customers, andtaking stronger competitive action when needed. The resultof the above characteristics leads enterprises to cut costs andincreases their speed to bring solutions to market.

E-Business ‘On-Demand’ emerged post-Y2k, characterizedby fast-changing demand, business process optimization,integration, and Moore’s Law. The highlight of thismovement is the ability for businesses to share datahorizontally across business verticals and link partners,suppliers, and customers. ‘On-Demand’ customers includeGE, eBay, Charles Schwab, Cisco, and IBM itself.

Only by closely integrating all groups in their businessmodels, processes, and IT systems, can enterprisesbecome ‘On-Demand.’ 2

The late 1990s was all about distributed computing. As thedistributed client-server cycle evolved, IT management wentfrom IT managers maintaining complete control over the ITenvironment to a shift in power at the hands of regional orlocal field and operations managers. IT environments becamecomplex, tangled webs of data characterized by redundantapplications and little data sharing. Today, centralizedcomputing is making a comeback.

For the help desk community, ‘On-Demand’ is aboutestablishing a set of processes for managing your ITenvironment (“Think Pink”), streamlining your operations,eliminating unnecessary third-party hardware andsoftware, and ensuring service delivery 24x7. For thoseenterprises that have mainframes sitting idle or backing upheavily distributed environments with multiple databasesand applications, they should consider unleashing thepower of Big Blue and an application suite that ties directlyinto the mainframe environment.

According to Software Strategies, 70 percent of IT spending islocked into maintenance support of the status quo. Because ofthis fact, IT groups find it difficult to respond to new businessneeds, nor is there the time, money, or software developmentcapacity available for any enterprise to contemplate acomplete ‘rip and replace’ of all existing systems.

The need has developed for composite applications thatembrace legacy environments coupled with the capabilityto address new business rules and relationships.

Software Strategies refers to composite applications asquicker and cheaper to build, making effective use ofsound traditional software and independent softwarevendor application components, and having the ability tobe repurposed to new generation application workflows.

When you consider that approximately 80 percent of theworld’s machine-readable data is held on mainframes andthat there are 11,000 zSeries mainframe customers outthere, the idea to build close to your core database andapplications becomes more and more compelling. 3

“Operating in an environment where the core databasesreside helps you avoid going through a lot of unnecessarygyrations,” Mark Ransfield, CTO of StreamFoundrystates. “Distributed servers were developed independentof the mainframes with the idea that mainframes wereyesterday’s news.” It was because of this philosophy that

1 Seach390.Com, Kate Evans-Correia 7/20/042 Software Strategies, The Enterprise Transformation Modernization & Integration Top Priority Today, page 63 Software Strategies, The Enterprise Transformation Modernization & Integration Top Priority Today, page 14

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applications running on distributed and mainframeenvironments appear chaotic and manually intensive.

Enterprises that have over 20 plus years of data stored onhundreds of DB2, IMS, and Infoman databases requireapplications that harness the rich library of data thatorganizations have collected. “Applications that manageonly six months of data at a time and require integrationwith additional storage components are costly andinefficient,” says Ransfield.

There is an advantage to housing your applications anddatabases on the mainframe. At a deeper level, thismassive application inventory contains a wealth ofdetailed business logic and business process flowdefinition, much of it not documented anywhere else, thatmust be reused for new generation applicationssupporting the transformed business workflows andprocesses of ‘On Demand.’ 4 Access to this database iswhat empowers the applications with process efficiencies.

Mercer did a study of 50 diverse zSeries mainframecustomers in 2003 and 89 percent of respondents citedthe mainframe as the most reliable, available, resilient,and recoverable of any standard commercial system. Themean time between failures is between 35 and 60 yearswith 99.999% availability. Security and privacy rankedsecond among the characteristics cited. 5

CitiGroup is one such company with years’ worth ofinvestment in mainframe programs and applications.

They recently implemented an application for problem,change, and request management within theirInformation Management (Infoman) for z/OS databaseand experienced significant computer resource andcost savings. With over an 80 percent reduction inMIPS and CPU, they were able to more efficientlymanage their service desk applications and processover five times the amount of transactions with thesame amount of hardware. In addition, the application,because it was part of the database, allowed them toprocess transactions in milliseconds and permittedend-users to enjoy a fast, user-friendly completelyredundant Web and/or 3270 interface.

One value CitiGroup dervies from the mainframe is theability to do batch processing. CitiCards bundle releasesevery other month comprised of 15 parents and 500-600activities. The advantage of this process is the ability toview the time line of events and the fact that you canexpect the data to be reliable and delivered expeditiously,according to Mike Coon, IT Manager at CitiGroup’sDevelopment and Support Group in South Dakota.

“Companies are coming back to the mainframe, saidCoon. “The mindset in a distributed environment is thatwhen servers go down, people say ‘oh, well.’ When themainframe goes down, people are shocked. Enterprisesspend billions of dollars in contingency plans. Thebenefit of the mainframe is that people expect it to be on100% of the time. (Because of this, IT departments) havemore confidence in the mainframe.”

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With its reputation for reliability and scalability, the mainframe has sustained over four decades of excellence

within the enterprise. Just when you thought it was going the way of the Betamax and the Walkman,

it continues to flex its proverbial technical muscle.

With its reputation for reliability and scalability, the mainframe has sustained over four decades of excellence

within the enterprise. Just when you thought it was going the way of the Betamax and the Walkman,

it continues to flex its proverbial technical muscle.

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4 Software Strategies, The Enterprise Transformation Modernization & Integration Top Priority Today, page 155 Software Strategies, The Enterprise Transformation Modernization & Integration Top Priority Today, page 22


Service AssuranceI see two common themes emerging; integration of ITservice management components through a strongconfiguration manager and service level assurance. Asrich media voice, video, and data overtake the enterprise,the mainframe is once again being hailed for its overallreliability and scalability.

So, once you’ve streamlined your core IT servicemanagement applications with the mainframe andintegrated all the various components, service levelmanagement will help you maintain a level of service forall of your applications. Service assurance applicationsshould be flexible enough to monitor applications bothstatically and dynamically (i.e. taking into considerationassigned outages and downtime for upgrades and newreleases) and have enough intuition to monitor thenetwork layers connecting client devices with the servers.

“By integrating your service desk application with yourmainframe, one minimizes potential faults and servicedegradations,” Ransfield reported. “It completely eliminatesthe application server and from a service assuranceperspective increases your probability of delivering99.999% reliability.”

Service assurance applications should also be customizablefor specific business tasks from everything to monitoringthe temperature in your server room to clocking the timeit takes to open and close a trouble ticket.

As the demands on IT become more challenging,enterprises should consider simplifying their environmentto address the onslaught. When building your processarchitecture, maximize your investment in yourmainframe, integrate an application that works within thecore infrastructure, and implement service levelmanagement that is customizable to each independenttask and scalable enough to address the health of youroverall IT environment.

Marc Heimlich has over 10 years of success in Sales andMarketing with Fortune 500 companies. He is the VicePresident of Sales and Marketing for SteamFoundry(www.steamfoundry.com). Streamfoundry Inc. developssoftware applications for the IT Service ManagementIndustry. Prior to StreamFoundry, he spent three years withLucent Technologies building its Software Division in theCLEC, IXC and Government space. Marc left Lucent as thenumber one Manager in North America in Software Salesgrowing the business 20 percent year-to-year and contributingto Lucent’s first software sale into the Department of Defense.Marc also worked in the Media and Entertainment Industrieswith AOL and Cox. His educational background includes anMBA in Finance from the Stern School of Business at New YorkUniversity and a BA in Political Science from Emory University.You can reach Marc at [email protected] or bycalling 800-220-5778.

“We’ve decided to hunker down and just waitfor the virus to get done with us.”

©2003 Ted Goff

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HDI Certification Standards—Call for RecommendationsHDI has issued a global call for industry practitionersand experts to make recommendations for updated/revised certification standards. Applicants mustdemonstrate support center industry experience. Committeebusiness—requiring approximately eight hours per monthof volunteer time over four months (May 2005 throughAugust 2005) will be handled through conference callsand reviewing and writing recommendations; no travelis necessary. For more information, please visit:www.ThinkHDI.com/certification/standards.aspx.

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The first in this series, The Metrics Reference Guide, is nowavailable. This book is your introduction to the MetricsGuide and discusses how HDI will define, measure, andcalculate according to the Balanced Scorecard Model. TheMetrics Reference Guide is to be used as a source book forthe individual metrics books to follow. Gold membersand above, look for your copy in the mail, and non-members, purchase this and subsequent booklets for$29.95 each online. Visit the HDI e-store to order yourcopy today.

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