You want us to support what?

 This paper by Nathan Carpenter and Ryan Tucker describes the importance of communication and collaboration between the help desk and service managers.

The paper is mainly written from the perspective of the help desk and is based around improving what is quite probably a common issue for numerous help desk and IT support departments.

The crux of the problem that this paper outlines is that the help desk is often the very last stop on a project's journey before it goes out to the public. This lack of communication puts the help desk in a bad position to support the new service and often the quality of customer service suffers as a result. To resolve this issue the “Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES)” Help Desk at the University of Illinois began to take a more active role in offering support for the services provided by CITES. In short this revolved around a help desk representative being present at “The Table” for all the stages of a projects development. The six main points outlined in this paper “The six steps to success” cover this in more detail and are I think a good example of how simply and easily something that often presents major issue to IT and supporting departments can be improved upon by simply listening, being involved and planning during the course of any service changes.

Overall I think that the ideas being put forward by the authors of this paper have merit and could go a long way to improving the quality of help desk and other related services, not just for IT but for many other industries that often find themselves in a similar position.