Streamline your help desk processes with advanced analytics - Part 2

In part one of this blog series, we discussed two of the major challenges faced in an IT help desk and the different ways an IT-driven advanced analytics solution can overcome them. In this blog, we'll shed light on more problems that occur within your IT department and the crucial role analytics plays in addressing them.

1. Overcome communication barriers among internal teams

When service teams within the IT department don't operate seamlessly, share vital information, or communicate with each other, it leads to the lack of a single source of truth, decreased productivity, and procedural delays arising due to back-and-forth exchanges between the teams. If insights are splintered between teams like the IT service management and network operations center, it results in a fragmented outlook on the root cause or the fix to an incident. 

A siloed approach to IT incidents gives rise to conflicting and ineffective solutions that merely act as temporary fixes, as each service team provides insights into a different side of the story. IT teams must bridge this communication gap and strategically work together towards a single source of truth that facilitates efficient root-cause analysis and ticket resolutions. 

Consider this scenario: you are faced with a sudden influx of tickets from users unable to access their project management application. This would typically mean scrambling to assign these tickets among available technicians and pushing for fast resolutions. 

However, with a unified analytics platform that analyzes data from different applications, a better approach would be to combine insights from your network monitoring tool to check for alarms related to the project application during that period. This would shed crucial insight into the availability and responsiveness of your project application, helping you tackle the root cause of the incident effectively while saving your technicians' time.  

The report above tells you that the surge in incidents was due to the unavailability of your project application while the report below takes this analysis a step further to decipher the reason behind the unavailability. Built with data from your network monitoring application, it tells you that the project management portal was slow to respond, which renders the application sluggish and inaccessible to end users. By addressing this issue, you can remediate the core incident behind your IT tickets.

By establishing a data-centric approach to incident management across the different IT teams in your organization, you can streamline your help desk processes and boost productivity immensely. 

2. Avoid burning through your IT budget

Too many assets can burn a hole in your pocket and too few could lead to loss in employee productivity. Striking the right balance between both extremes can be pretty difficult. With an expanding employee base and new technologies raising different issues every day, how do you optimize your asset inventory? 

A smart way to do this is to compare your average monthly consumption with your asset inventory. This helps you understand if you have the right amount of assets. 

A safe bet is to ensure that the assets in stock are about 20-30% of your monthly asset consumption. This approach helps you replace missing, broken, or malfunctioning assets in your organization without impacting daily activities. When you have too many assets in stock, it drains your IT budget, and you run the risk of assets in storage becoming outdated the longer they're in storage. Instead, you can save these funds for future purchases of assets that would better address shifting user demands and market trends.  

These reports were built using Analytics Plus, ManageEngine's AI-driven IT analytics solution. It offers out-of-the-box integrations with several popular IT applications such as ServiceNow, Jira Software, Zendesk, and ManageEngine's suite of products. If you'd like to create similar reports using your IT data, try Analytics Plus for free.

Ready to learn more about analytics for IT operations? Talk to our experts to discover all the ways you can benefit from deploying analytics in your IT.