The continued pursuit of a more efficient IT department has sparked some pretty innovative models, the latest coming from Xangati, which today is announcing its Visual Trouble Ticket portal.
Xangati comes at the problem of reporting to the IT department what was happening at the time of a problem, anything from a VPN crash to a e-mail outage or a network sluggishness. Instead of wasting time trying to test different parts of the system to find the root of the problem, the end user can initiate a DVR-like recording of what was happening at the time of the problem, including the ability to rewind back in time. At the same time, it launches a trouble ticket so IT troubleshooters can “get inside” the system and start looking for what triggered the problem - whether device, connection or network-related.
I’ve long been frustrated by the entire process of reporting problems to the IT department. The triage process can be more like pong-pong as we go through the process of eliminating problems in the hopes of finding the culprit. I’ve even resorted to screen-grabbing the error message, uploading the image of it to Flickr and sending a link along with the trouble ticket.
But I also can imagine the increasingly complex types of problems that IT departments are facing, as well. Everyone in the office seems to want mobile mail on their iPhones, Blackberries, G1s and so on. They’re logging on to the VPN from Starbucks, hotel rooms and crowded convention centers. They’re accessing third-party cloud apps like Salesforce, WebEx, Facebook and Twitter. There are bound to be hiccups from time to time. In a statement, CEO Alan Robin said:
With today’s difficult economic climate, enterprise IT staffs are expected to do more with less – and managing an end-user’s application experience shouldn’t be an afterthought. Particularly with the rapid adoption of virtualization and cloud computing, it’s imperative that the help desk is delivered a solution that allows them to keep pace with supporting these operationally complex innovations.
It seems only right that companies would make some investments to increase the IT department’s efficiency, seeing how so many of them have been scaled back while demands have increased. Starting at Step One - the trouble ticket - seems to be something worth looking into, especially if it reduces the amount of time employees and customers spend trying to troubleshoot a problem.
