I wanted to call out a great example of what Marketing can learn from IT:  https://www.microsoft.com/itshowcase/execreport/introduction/default.html?page=2#fbid=FIGgRCi4nMn

The Microsoft IT department, through our CIO produce an executive report for the year. 

I get that in this example the IT department (Microsoft) will benefit from having access to a lot of great resources.  It looks polished and well crafted but for other IT departments, it doesn't have, to achieve a similar result!

What I like about it is:

It clearly communicates the strategy for the team, it's reflective and it's in tune with the objectives of the business.

I hope you enjoy reading it!

Dan

Jarod Greene is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Cherwell Software,™ a leader in IT service management (ITSM) and business enablement solutions. As a former Gartner® analyst, Jarod spent ten years covering the ITSM industry, with a focus on processes, organizational structure and enabling technologies.

In our current tech landscape of apps, cloud service providers and devices a-plenty, the IT service desk spends less and less time dealing with a standard set of hardware problems on company-issued machines. But it’s still hiring like it does.

Traditionally, the service desk has been staffed by junior-level associates who are highly skilled technicians. The job has been an entry point for working in a broader role in IT, offering a training ground where the business and IT connect, and the pain points are not only seen, but fully experienced. Turnover can be high—the most recent HDI® Support Center and Salary Report shows an 11% staff attrition rate for Level 1 support analysts.

The challenge these days is that new positions at the service desk are generally comprised of entry-level roles with entry-level salaries. Most highly talented, technical people coming out of MIT and Georgia Tech are not willing to work at the service desk—much less stay there long enough to become managers that pursue a conventional path to more highly paid and influential IT roles.

So how do you find the people who have the right blend of skills needed to fill today’s challenging and critical IT service desk role?

In 2015, it’s time to consider throwing out your singular requirement for technical know-how, and focus on finding people who are good with people. The ability to get end users through their struggles with Salesforce on their mobile devices is knowledge that can be taught. But the abilities to understand a broader set of business technology needs, treat people with empathy, communicate in language that can be understood by internal “customers”, and capture interactions and support processes with clarity and precision are skills that are far more difficult to teach.

In order to build a truly successful IT team in today’s complex technology ecosystem, start looking to hire people with the following skills:

1. Ability to troubleshoot multiple cloud-based services, devices and operating systems

When a marketing manager has trouble with the Marketo® marketing automation platform, does he call IT first? Not necessarily—he might call a peer first, then do a Google® search, and then call Marketo. What about a Macbook® that’s shutting off randomly? A business user might talk to someone in IT, and that person may escalate the case up the chain to an in-house specialist—who may ultimately recommend a trip to the Genius Bar at the Mac Store for help.

In the past, by comparison, most software packages were procured and managed in-house, and solutions bought off the shelf were highly customized to meet the needs of the organization. The CRM system was hosted in the company’s data center, and everyone’s desktop was connected to the company’s network at all times. There was no Marketo and no VPN to remote into.

Now things are decoupled and virtualized. This change has benefits, but it also means that when your user has an issue, you need to figure out where the point of failure is across many different potential points of failure. That’s not easy.

Managing an IT service desk in 2015 means having technicians that understand a landscape filled with multiple service providers, devices and operating systems. The people working with business users need to understand how those services are consumed, for what purpose, how that purpose serves the business and the impacts various types of issues have upon the business.

Service desk analysts are not offering end-to-end technical support for every program and every device. They’re getting a busy salesperson or the accounting lead headed in the right direction towards the help they need, as quickly as possible.

It’s less about “Let me take control over your device or what’s broken?” and more about “It worked yesterday for you. What changed between now and then among the many elements that comprise the service you’re consuming right now?” That’s a skill set traditional service desk professionals often don’t possess, yet it’s becoming more and more imperative.

2. Exceptional customer service skills

How do you run your service desk interviews? Here’s a tip: don’t ask anyone to unscrew the bottom of a laptop and take you on a tour of what’s inside. Find out the last time they encountered an irate customer, calmed them down and got them through their challenge.

Traditionally, there has been an adversarial relationship between the service desk and the business user, where the technician is frustrated because of the user’s lack of technical know-how. Today many business users speak “tech.” OK, maybe not in the same way an IT person does. But their level of digital literacy is light years ahead of their 1990’s counterparts. As such, the service desk analyst needs be respectful, assess the level of tech savvy of the business users and adjust the way they interact with them. The technician isn’t reading from a script, but is rather engaged in a dialogue.

Your service desk should be staffed by people who can quickly get to know the people on the other line and understand their frustrations. The conversations should sound something like this: “I understand why you’re frustrated. You’re in accounting. It’s the end of quarter and you can’t access a crucial application. The fact that you’re in accounting and it’s the end of quarter makes this the most important thing we do today.”

Service desk people need the skill set to gather context based on their conversations and keep broader business goals in mind. They are not there to fix machines, they are there to make sure the business is successful vis-à-vis its users.

3. Excellent collaboration and communication skills

When an IT ticket is opened, getting to a resolution can be very easy or very difficult. A lot depends on how the ticket is written. If the description lacks detail about the level of urgency, the nature of the problem or its complexity, the IT technicians tasked with solving the issue will suffer—as will the end users they are trying to serve.

Service desk staff have a lot to consider when opening a ticket. For example, everyone knows that silos exist between different IT specialties within a company. The person generating the ticket should know this and understand how to communicate the issue so that the right people are involved, at the right time, in the right way. Proper translation of the initial service desk call, enhanced with the appropriate level of detail, is critical for your internal team. Anything that’s not written down didn’t happen and creates extra work for the tier three technician whose time is too precious to waste.

Think of it as journalism. You need people who can ask the right questions, capture information skillfully and communicate it effectively so that everyone involved is set up for success. Your service desk analysts are both a translators and facilitators. They should be the first and only point of contact, assuming everything goes smoothly.

Find people who can write, tell a story and communicate. Those are the abilities that will help your team move faster internally, provide the service your business consumers expect and move the business forward.

Hire for Empathy, Teach the Tech

There is a war for talent. If you want lasting, successful service desk teams, you really shouldn’t look to the technical arena. You can teach the technical. Consider instead hiring from the hospitality industry, retail or other verticals that place a premium on teaching customer service, people skills and empathy. These skills should comprise the core of your team. Hire people who can talk to business users, capture their stories, translate them into tech and see them through to resolution.

If you’re an IT lead at a company, your reputation depends on business users’ interactions with the service desk. The people you hire need to match the new realities of IT so everyone can be successful together.

For further reading, be sure to download Cherwell Software’s eBook on how to step up your IT service desk game, and add real value to the business.

Using Microsoft datacenters as an integral part of your Disaster Recovery Plan:

Free hands-on event

• Do you want to learn about new disaster recovery options from Microsoft experts?

• Have you been putting off trying new technology due to time pressures or not knowing where to start?

• Do you think your disaster recovery strategy would benefit from a refresh?

• Have you considered refreshing your servers in the cloud instead of a hardware refresh?

If you answer yes to any of the above we may be able to help.

Your Microsoft IT Pro subject matter experts are coming to a city near you over the next couple of months to provide education on disaster recovery.  You will see demos and walk through hands on labs on the elements Microsoft provides to support a disaster recovery strategy. 

The content is delivered in a fun, educational way, what’s more we will even provide a free Azure pass to ensure it’s not costing you to learn with Azure.

Attend the event and you will learn:

• How to replicate virtualized workloads to Microsoft's global data centers

• How to backup data and protect workloads with nearly infinite scalability

• How to implement a hybrid replication utilizing both cloud and on premise

• How to do back up without needing to buy more tape

• Backing up your Windows clients (including Windows 10) to remote storage

Dates and locations:

Click here to register: TechNet on Tour

We look forward to seeing you at one of the events above.

The IT Pro team.

The factors hindering IT’s efforts in this area have shifted over time, but over the last several years, the race to answer this question has become all the more urgent as a viable, competitive landscape of IT services has emerged.  The reality is that IT organizations today must compete for their businesses’ business. This is due to not only to an increasingly self-sufficient and tech-savvy user base, but also to the widespread availability, affordability and ease of implementing X-aaS solutions such as software, infrastructure and storage as a service. The end result is that the business frequently makes its own technology decisions and procures its own solutions—further marginalizing the IT organization in the process.

So the question has shifted from “How can IT improve its standing within the business” to “How can IT improve its standing within a competitive landscape?”

Unfortunately, IT has historically done a poor job of promoting itself and positioning itself as a strategic partner to the business. But this is exactly what IT must do in order to stay relevant.

In fact, it sounds like a job for marketing. Yes, marketing!

The Value Proposition

In order to change the perception of IT’s role within the organization, it’s necessary to employ some fundamental marketing techniques to develop and communicate the IT department’s “value proposition.” A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered, and that value is determined by the recipient, not the provider. In the case of IT, we may do a terrific job delivering services to the business, but if our customers do not believe those services solve their problems and make their lives easier, then we provide no value to them.

Do you have a value proposition? Does it describe what you offer and why what you offer is useful? Why should the business use your services and not the myriad of cloud-based services available to them?

To develop your value proposition, you must thoroughly understand your business consumers’ needs, wants and behaviors. This means getting to know your users and how they interact with the technology you support. For example, providing time for service desk analysts to get away from their desks to observe how salespeople use the CRM application can provide key insight about how to better support users. Riding along with field service technicians can give analysts a deeper appreciation of the urgency of incidents related to the field service management application. Conducting this type of ethnographic research can position your IT team to alleviate pain and position your group as an enabling partner.  

Once your team has defined its value proposition, you can work to change perception by taking a page from the “pragmatic marketing” playbook and actively demonstrating—and relentlessly communicating—the value your team provides. Yes, you absolutely have to stabilize and support IT services, but you can’t stop there; the IT service desk can be a strategic channel that lies at the intersection of IT and the business. Empowering the function that interacts with your business users each and every day can go a long way toward shifting the conversation.

Persona Management

One of the bigger misconceptions among IT organizations is that the business user base is a single, homogeneous entity, and that non-IT employees have the same level of technology acumen (or lack thereof!) and practices. The truth is, the business does not have a single user type; to the contrary, it may have 50 or more. Understanding that employees have  not only different levels of comfort with technology, but also have different use cases, can help the IT organization understand how better to support and deliver IT services. This is where persona management comes in.

For instance, knowing that Frances in accounting is a technology novice in all areas outside of Microsoft Excel can be useful in helping her troubleshoot and resolve an issue. Furthermore, knowing that all of Frances’ issues (regardless of what the service portfolio says) are mission critical when it comes to closing out the fiscal quarter is an important data point in prioritizing incidents. The same goes for your middle-aged account exec road warrior, your millennial contact center representative, and your baby boomer executive VP. Navigating these different roles can be tricky, but understanding these personas, along with their unique pains, goals and objectives, can pay a major role in helping the IT organization craft and deliver on its value proposition. You can start understanding and developing personas through surveys and focus groups if those resources are available to you.

A/B Testing

Having been the sole provider of IT services to this point, IT has become accustomed to providing online experiences that are more aligned with its own needs that with those of the consumer. Take IT self-service portals, for example, which have historically failed to deliver on the promise of reduced IT labor intensity and improved customer satisfaction. The success of IT self-service depends largely on the user’s desire to self-resolve, regardless of how easy IT makes it. Why else would password reset still be the number one IT service desk contact type, despite the wide availability of password reset solutions?

Where IT organizations have fallen short is in creating self-service “experiences” that are aligned with your business culture and personas. Your users may not expect an Amazon-like experience for IT, but utilization data might tell you they don’t want your stuffy portal either.  A/B testing is a systematic, data-driven process that helps marketers test alternative treatments of a web site (or other marketing mediums) to see how various factors influence response rate. Under this model, each version of the web site introduces a variation in layout, messaging, imagery, button style or any other attribute the marketer wants to test. Two versions of the site are run concurrently (unbeknownst to the user), and analysis is conducted across a sample of users to see which version of the site performs more favorably.

IT can use a similar technique to gain an understanding of how the self-service portal can be changed to drive more usage—and ultimately, improved customer satisfaction.  Work with alternative versions of your IT self-service portal and see which one(s) resonate with your user base. Generally speaking, the layout should be clean, easy to navigate and, if possible, capture user context to improve the experience. If promoting usage of your self-service portal is a high priority but you don’t have in-house expertise or resources to drive changes, consider investing in a third-party UX design/usability firm.

Embrace Peer-to-Peer Communities

Traditionally, IT organizations have embraced phone, email and chat as their primary support channels. However, social media—specifically peer-to-peer communities—has not be widely regarded as a viable channel. This thinking needs to change.  

A peer-to-peer community can be a dynamic interaction hub where people—including members of the IT organization—can share ideas, provide support and offer suggestions. One specific benefit to the IT organization is that “super-users” within the business can share their knowledge with a wider number of users. For example, when the person most knowledgeable about Salesforce.com is a seasoned sales representative, his willingness to share tips and tricks likely only benefits his closest colleagues who ask him for this type of assistance. Peer-to-peer support allows this kind of assistance to scale by providing him the means to “write once – answer many.” It also enables IT to manage (not police) the community and ensure the information exchanged is vetted for accuracy, provides value and doesn’t put the IT infrastructure at risk.

P2P communities leverage social software tools like Yammer and Jive to let members connect. If your organization uses these types of tools, it’s very likely the conversation about IT has already started. If not, it’s not too late to get in there!

In summary, IT is sitting on a gold mine of assets and intelligence that the proverbial competitive landscape will never possess, including: 1) proximity to and familiarity with the unique needs of its users, 2) a fundamental understanding of the inner workings of the business from a technology perspective, and 3) the broader business’ strategic goals and objectives. If harnessed strategically, this information can be used to position IT as the solution provider of choice. And while IT may not always be the provider of the business “technology,” it can (and should) act as the broker of those capabilities – maintaining its power to decide whether to buy, build or partner.

The above list is by no means an exhaustive list of marketing practices IT can leverage to increase business/IT engagement. But these methods are both practical and affordable, and will give you a great start for demonstrating IT’s value to the business—and changing overall perception of IT’s role within the organization.

For further reading, see the following resources:

How to Effectively Market Your IT Service Desk

7 Essentials that Raise IT’s Value to the Business

Author bio: Jarod Greene is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Cherwell Software, a leader in IT service management (ITSM) and business enablement solutions. As a former Gartner analyst, Jarod Greene spent ten years covering the ITSM industry, with a focus on processes, organizational structure and enabling technologies.

As part of an extended AngelBeat gathering, the evangelists at Microsoft will be delivering a tour of the Microsoft Azure platform.  This extended session is aimed at IT Pros who want to get hands on with Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform.  The evangelists will show:

·       Running Virtual Machines in Azure

·       Using the Azure gallery for pre-defined virtual machines

·       Capturing Virtual Machine

·       Setting up Virtual Networks

·       Setting up storage in the cloud

·       Backing up an Azure Virtual Machine (currently in preview)

This session is ideally aimed at those that want to learn about Azure from a technical perspective, it’s not designed to be hands on but if delegates wanted to bring their own subscriptions to the event then they would be welcome to follow along.

It's free to sign up:

Denver: https://angelbeatdenver2015.eventbrite.com 

Boston: https://angelbeatboston2015.eventbrite.com

We look forward to seeing you there!

The US IT Pro Team

Spend the day with over a hundred of your closest IT buddies and learn how to get your organization hybrid-ready at this exclusive, FREE, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Workshop: Ignite Edition.  Learn how to move your IT workloads from on-premises to the cloud and back again. Just to sweeten the deal, everyone who attends will receive a $100 Microsoft Store voucher. We’ll also host a free after-event cocktail hour where you can mingle, sip and talk shop with your peers.  Sign up here: https://aka.ms/MonsterITCamp

The goal of labs 1-3 is to show you how Azure and PowerShell can be used to perform familiar tasks while reducing the need for using a GUI tool or a web interface. Using the lab manual and scripts referenced within it, you will set up core Azure components for your cloud infrastructure, including storage accounts, networking and cloud services.  Then you will deploy a traditional Active Directory infrastructure using PowerShell for managing Azure and remotely connect to the VMs to configure Active Directory. Finally, you will use that AD infrastructure to sync with Azure Active Directory and activate Multifactor Authentication features.

With Lab 4, you will use a single script to automate the deployment of a SQL Server and a Web Server to host an application. With minimal adjustments to the script (for uniqueness), you can experience the power behind reusable code in your organization.

Download the lab and get started!

• Lab Guide for Labs 1-3
  • Other links mentioned in the guide - PowerShell Snippets (https://bit.ly/AzureQ4Snippets) and the PowerShell Remoting Script (https://aka.ms/psremotingscript)

• Lab 4 Script

• Tuesday, April 14th in San Francisco, CA
• Wednesday, April 15th in Nashville, TN
• Thursday, April 16th in Sacramento, CA
• Friday, April 17th in Tampa, FL

Join us for this interactive, full-day training session and learn how to move your workloads from on-premises to the cloud and back again. You'll see how Microsoft Azure supports powerful virtualization, on-demand application scaling, complete data control, and the fastest customer response times around. Get the scoop from a technical evangelist who can show you how to expand your IT options without adding complexity – or giving yourself a headache in the process. Here are just a few of the topics we'll cover:

• Extending your network with Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines 
• Tackling workload migration, networking and other key scenarios 
• Microsoft Azure for Test and Development (IaaS) 
• Application migration to Microsoft Azure (IaaS & PaaS) 
• SQL BI, Media, Backup, DR and much more 

Don't miss one of these valuable, free events  – regardless of whether you're new to the cloud, or you currently use an on-premises, hybrid or fully cloud-based solution. All IT Pros are welcome! Sessions run from 9:00am - 4:00pm. Attendance is limited, so save your seat today.

Not close enough for you? Let us know in the comments and don't forget to check out the full blog series on Azure and the Hybrid Cloud for the IT Pro.

• Backup/Recover Your Files to/from Azure Storage
• How to Move or Migrate SQL Workloads to Azure
• Migrating Web Applications from On-Prem to Azure
• Global Delivery with Azure Content Delivery Network 
• Azure Multifactor Authentication and Identity 
• How to Get Starting Automating IaaS with PowerShell