ITIL states:

"The responsibility of 1st Level Support is to register and classify received Incidents and to undertake an immediate effort in order to restore a failed IT Service as quickly as possible."

There are some people who think that is more convenient to let the customer answer some question by following a script in a web form and implementing an automatic routing directly to the second level. They support this idea stating that in this way the organization will reduce the needed staff to do the work at the same time they get less time to get the solution for the incident.

What do you think. Is it good to automate the routing process by delegating to the customer the incident classification? Is it ITIL compliant?

Gerardo

HI Gerado,

Like most answers related to ITIL, "it depends."

I think the first question you need to answer is, what is the maturity of the Service Desk function and the Incident and Problem Management processes. To successfully automate the classification of an incident requires a robust Known Error database, a Configuration Management System and the capability for automating the capture of relevant information from the user. That means developing a predetermined and limited set of selections that the user can make and those must be engineered so as to use terms the user would use, not the staff of second level incident management. Similarly, the technical capability needs to exist to register then parse and route an automatically classified incident (workflow)…and your incident management support software needs to be integrated or interfaced with it.

I've had a client achieve what I think you guys are try to accomplish, by putting second level support staff in the Service Desk, and the adoption of a policy of treating any previously unknown incident as a problem. They diagnose, document and formulate workarounds, or the remedial action required for that incident. Then the next time they see a matching incident they can normally provide a workaround if necessary or "dispatch" the incident for remediation to the second level incident support staff without a lot of time or staff effort involved. This has been a very successful approach for them since they are a managed service provider and their service desk is a customer facing service desk, and they (the company) has responsibility for the restoration of services they manage for their customers.

I would caution any organization to avoid approaching Service Desk staffing from a "cost reduction" perspective. It never works. Instead look at what your service requirement are, where in the incident lifecycle resources are consumed and what opportunities exist to bring your process efficiency and effectiveness in line with your service requirements. If cannot to this, don't waste your time trying to automate what is effectively a solution to an undefined problem.

Also, based on what you mentioned in your question, one of the things I'd ask you is how much time and second level resources are you going to consume responding to improperly classified incidents, performing proper classification and rerouting the incident. Last time I checked second level staff make a lot more money and there are a lot fewer of them, and you shouldn't do things that will waste their time … and how is your customer going to respond being "shuffled" from department to department in search of the right someone to restore their service.

I worked for a boss that liked to point out, "For every problem, there is a simple appealing solution that is wrong." The proposed solution is not simple.

Let me know if this answers your question.

Regards,

Dave