In recent years, many organizations have moved to centralize their help desk operations and establish a single point of contact for workers, said Roy Atkinson, an analyst at HDI, whose members represent a help desk community of about 50,000 people. Atkinson said another part of the explanation could be the fact that IT complexity is actually increasing, especially as users seek to connect multiple devices, including mobile phones, tablets and laptops to corporate networks.
Earl Begley, who heads HDI’s desktop advisory board and is an IT project manager at the University of Kentucky, said incident volumes for the university’s healthcare help desk, which serves the UK hospital, have increased by 15% to 20% a year.
For those organizations reporting an increase in help desk calls, about 41% attributed the uptick to infrastructure or product changes, upgrades or conversions; 26% cited expanded service offerings by the support center; and 22.5% said they have more customers, according to the HDI study.
The increase in the number of help desk support requests is happening at the same time IT managers are cutting money spent on supporting help desks, according to another new study that was released recently by Computer Economics.
In its survey of IT organizations, the IT research firm found that help desk employees now represent about 6% of the total IT staff, after accounting for about 6.9% of the average IT staff for the past several years.
The report said that this decrease “represents a relatively substantial dip and indicates that providing high-quality support to users assumed a lower priority amid the wave of operational budget-cutting and staff reductions that accompanied the official end of the recession.” Computer Economics also said that a number of factors affect the size of a help desk, including the use of outsourcing, an increase in the number of workers with smartphones, ITIL adoption, and improvements in applications and devices.
“Some of these trends are working to diminish the size and function of the help desk, while others are putting more pressure on help desk staff,” the research organization said in its report.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9203218/Help_desk_calls_on_the_rise?source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2011-01-05