I wanted to write this blog to explain why for the past two years, we at CrossRealms International have been working on creating an engineering desk to really provide value when something goes wrong whether it’s a workstation, a user, a system, an environment, or cloud.
Let me first start by stating the obvious: the technology stack needed by organizations to achieve their business goals is getting complex. Even with increased cloud adoption (which promised to make things easier with one stop shop), the business technology stack continues to be more interconnected, complex and less secure.
The classical support desk which helps users with their printing issues, application access, passwords etc. is slowly becoming irrelevant because the issues have become more sophisticated with tentacles in just about everything. VPN access, Identity management, cloud administration, application support, disaster recovery, ransomware, cyber security and many others. What made things even harder is that due to the economies of scale, technology vendors reduced their service desk staffing and removed the option of escalation to solve complex problems. In summary -fixing the desktop is no longer useful because most likely the issue is somewhere else.
So now what?
As a practicing consultant I attended many customer meetings to figure out how to align our services with their technology needs and for the past few years, four issues kept on cropping up:
- What percentage of tickets are resolved vs. escalated or routed back to the client IT staff?
- Major Vendor support is lacking and getting worse why can’t CrossRealms International engineers figure it out?
- Are there root causes to these issues so that we don’t have to keep on dealing with them?
- Can you manage my basic operational items like patching and upgrades since your engineering desk is open 24x7 and my staff needs a break?
With the above items in mind, the engineering desk was born and we started the hiring and training processes necessary to build this department two years ago. So What is this engineering desk? It’s a group of IT professionals with advanced technology certifications working together to solve both the simple client issues and the more complex root cause analysis, security and product integration issues covering Tier I, II and III across the relevant technologies. From Cisco Certified Professionals to Microsoft Certified administrators, Palo Security Engineers, Sophos Architects, Splunk Consultants and many others, we would start with a two year program to train individuals across these industries, provide them real projects to develop field expertise, then work together to solve customer issues.
Does it work? As it stands, I have three observational facts:
- Support tickets are getting solved entirely by this desk with very little escalation needed
- Tickets escalated to vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco, Palo and others have almost entirely disappeared
- Projects are moving extremely quickly. Two recent projects were quite complex (establishing Zero Trust Networks and Teams Integration with 3CX) Both are going at an incredible clip with the telephony integration with teams completed in two weeks and the Zero Trust Networks meeting the milestones on weekly basis
I’m sure we are going to find new opportunities for our engineering desk and deal with adversity as we continue to grow it and add more technologies– I will keep you posted and for the next blog, I’m going to discuss why the engineering desk is a great option for engineers in their early years of practice and what I observed during the interviews
For more information, please check out our 24×7 Engineering Support Desk Services or you can reach me directly at uhoulila@cr.jlizardo.com