Over the course of the last few weeks I have spoken with quite a few organizations, including Fujitsu-Siemens, BT Basilica and Citrix amongst others, on the subject of IT support, perhaps once traditionally called the Help Desk. Now Freeform Dynamics has undertaken considerable research on the subject of support, best practice, support systems and power users. This pool of knowledge coupled with the experience of the analysts in the team allows us to interpret our findings in many ways and for me it has become apparent that the IT Help Desk has reached a major inflection point.

For most of its history the IT help desk / response desk / support desk has undertaken many roles in different organisations. Usually it is the primary contact point both when things go wrong with users' systems and when they wish to request new services. Now in one of my former roles in the IT world we also utilised the fact that the people we had manning our help desk also got on far better with the end users than the IT techies in the team did. This, frankly, permitted us to both increase user satisfaction with their contact with the IT group whilst dealing with more issues day by day.

These roles for IT support are undoubtedly valuable, but it appears to me that for many organisations the traditional role has become limiting. It is now very much the fact that "Support" is, for the majority of people inside the business or, for vendors of applications / services, their clients outside the primary contact point with the IT organization. "Support" is now so intertwined in the mind of users that it is become the measurement by which IT service quality is often measured. Or to put it bluntly, at the very least support has become the public face of the IT service taking the role over from the service itself.

The question then becomes just how this Public face could and, perhaps, should, be utilised by "IT"? To my mind the answer is compelling—'Support' must become a combination of the public face, the communication channel, the marketing machine and the very service delivery itself. Support must cease to be the reporting point for problems and advice and become the very conduit of service. Done well IT can then finally begin to both demonstrate the value it delivers to the business, it can position itself as a very visible means for the business to better exploit IT and for IT to guide and nurture its exploitation to the benefit of all.

Or is this a step too far? What do you think?