...able to maneuver past crisis situations such as the dot com crash and 9/11 but the company was never really the same since (staff cuts and cost awareness). In addition, the enterprise has experienced problems with their information technology infrastructure and help desk services. The company, which specializes in commodity trading in East and North America, These issues have stemmed from IT employees lacking motivation to complete their tasks, resulting in quality and cost issues. The case revolves around J-Trading’s decision to outsource its infrastructure and help desk functions, from problems and challenges in the selection process, alignment issues, and overall governance. Outsourcing in this form is a common occurrence and companies are realizing that in order to focus on their core operations they must outsource. Moreover, IT services are usually outsourced when functions are difficult to manage or out of control. Something that was very evident in this case. Other reasons include scarcity of resources and reducing overall risk. The case gave us a good look of how outsourcing, as much as it may be a good idea, comes with it’s fair share of challenges and requires the utmost control from top management. 2 Problems and Challenges 2.1 Quality of in-house PC help desk service was poor Despite being extremely qualified, members of the PC helpdesk team saw...
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...[pic] ----------------------- Name _________montrell flowers__________________________ Chapter _ 5_______ The goal of most help desk operations is to provide clients with a single point of contract for information requests, IT services, and problem resolution. • Many help desks are organized in a multiplayer system. The lowest level is an incident screener. Common features of ACD: Skill set distribution , overflow routing, call accounting, queue time. The information Technology Infrastructure Library ITIL, is one of many evolving frameworks, guidelines and standards. The Physical Environment of a help desk facility includes the Workspace, furniture, equipment and computer systems help desk agents. Support workers may be vulnerable to job stress when the expectations of a position do not match personal characteristics of a worker. Key Terms: Archive – An incident archive is a database or paper file used to store and retain records relating to closed incidents. Asynchronous – A method of communication In which the communicators do not have to participate at the same time; e-mail and web based communication are examples. Authentication procedure – An incident management step in which an agent determines whether the help desk is authorized to handle a call. ACD- A computer telephony system that automates many of the first steps in incident management, such as a greeting. Best Practices – Procedures, tools and methods that successful support groups employ; these...
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...control unit in place that doubles as a service desk. The unit only under takes out bound calls and does not have a service desk monitoring application that allows one to track and actually see progress on outstanding issues. Users often leave situations to escalate due to the absence of a structured system in place which assigns and escalates issues to the appropriate quarters. This paper seeks to propose a lasting solution to the challenge the absence of the service desk poses to MSL. There is a need to introduce a service desk management application. A service desk seeks to facilitate the integration of business processes into the service management infrastructure. In addition to actively monitoring and owning Incidents and user questions, this also provides an interface for other activities such as customer change requests, information delivery and a platform to receive feedback from users. Something that is not always recognized is that having ITIL processes is a requirement for an effective service desk. Help desks can contribute to improve the quality of a company's products or services. When customers call a help desk, specialists typically fill out problem reports describing the call. MSL can use software to tabulate and track these reports from initiation to resolution. Solutions architects can review these problem reports to implement improvements. If several customers call with the same problem, the help desk might alert quality control and possibly senior...
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...* * Help Desk Operations for the Operating Forces Wilfredo Santiago Park University Author Note This is an insider view on how to streamline and improve the services provided by MCTSSA (Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity) Help Desk to the Operating Forces. Abstract MCTSSA Help Desk was established over 10 years ago to provide technical support to the operating forces. Today the Help Desk is referred to as OFTSSC (Operating Forces Tactical Systems Support Center) with a specific mission stated as: to provide continuous, distributed technical support, troubleshooting, and problem resolution for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (C4I) systems, in order to optimize those systems as force multipliers in assisting Marines to win battles. While the OFTSSC focuses on the needs of the Marine Corps, it offers technical assistance to all C4I system users across the entire Department of Defense (DoD), U.S. Government and all U.S. Foreign National Allies. The OFTSSC provides its customers with remote technical assistance by facilitating online access to supported system documentation, system software and offering live interaction with system subject matter experts (SMEs), via phone, online chat, and email. If a solution to a customer problem is not immediately available, OFTSSC personnel will actively work to obtain a solution by elevating customer issues to MCTSSA support engineers, system vendors, Marine Corps Systems Command program...
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...Wherever there are people involved, there will always be conflict. People deal with conflict and negotiation everyday, especially in the workplace. Sometimes people choose to avoid conflict and negotiation because they have difficulties and feel stress that conflict and negotiation can produce. Avoiding conflict and negotiation could help a group of people reach a temporary resolution for a short period of time; however, it will cause more obstacles and troubles in the future work. So it is extremely important to learn how to use efficiency skills to manage the conflict involving communication and contribute a great resolution for the long term. Competing goals are the primary cause of conflict. If we want to solve the conflict, first we need to identify the cause of the conflict. There are usually two different types of goals in most conflict situations, which are content and relational. Since people have uncompromising elements of these two goals, the conflict will be brought to them. First, according to the definition of the content goals, “Content goals involve the apparent issues or obvious reason for a dispute” (O’Hair et al., p335). Most of the time, people all understand their own content goals very well; however, they have different perspectives unknown to each other. Many times conflicts are led by failure to communicate differing goals. Second, relationship goals are very important in communication as well because conflict may not be handled until the relationship...
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...Case Study 1 Level A Effective Room Arrangement Kelby Cooper Liberty University Online Abstract Teachers’ responsibilities to their students not only include teaching them, but also giving them an environment that they can learn in. Edward is a student who is having trouble completing his work. This paper’s purpose is to identify what is exactly distracting him and how we can help him focus on completing his work through effective room arrangement. Minimizing Distractions Edward is a little over eight years old, is in the third grade, and continually has trouble keeping focus on his work. This leads him to being unable to complete his work and can be caused by three possible distractions. The Iris Center Star Sheet says, “Items (windows, doors, aquariums, etc.), equipment (computer, overhead projectors, etc.), and individuals (reading groups, adjacent peers, etc.) can be distracting (Evertson, Emmer, & Worsham, 2003)” (Evertson & Poole, n.d.). The first distraction that Edward encounters is the window. With many different grades and classes, in addition to weather changes, Edward can easily be distracted seeing a gym class outside the window or younger students having their recess at the time. An easy way to solve this distraction is to get blinds for the windows (unless they already have some) and pull it over so he cannot see the other students outside. With Edward in his current position, the second distraction he is facing would be the computer. He could...
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...Personnel in Technology Amy Mullen TEC 401 July 16, 2012 Clyde Roberts Personnel in Technology Technology support teams are on the rise with new and improved technological advances are emerging. Effective technology support teams reflect knowledge, experience, and strong communication skills. Technology plays a major role in organization operations in today’s society compared to decades prior. The key to success in using the many forms of technology available is to train users about the technology and the operation of the devices. In this paper, I discuss the training and implementation programs in using technology, performance support and Help Desk technologies, and the relationships between coworkers as well as between support teams and customers. Training Training is the foundation of organizational success. Organizations and their employees should have knowledge of the technologies used in the workplace and understand the enhancement technological tools bring to the workplace. Unfortunately, end-user information systems (EUIS) training is not a top priority in a time it is necessary with the growing technological advances (Regan & O’Connor). Training, in essence, defined as a learning experience with a beginning and end differs from support as support implies an ongoing learning experience. Specified by Regan and O’Conner (2002), the...
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...Five Services to Help Grow Your IT Services Business in 2013 — and Beyond ConnectWise.com Introduction 2013 is a year of great opportunity for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). As reported in the Wall Street Journal, IT spending by businesses with fewer than 500 employees is expected to grow by $4 billion to a total of $27.2 billion in 2015.1 The good news does not end there for MSPs. According to a recent study, 89% of MSP clients are “very” or “mostly” satisfied with their providers.2 In fact, a significant majority of clients reported that they intend to increase their IT spending in the next two years. Now is the time to position your company for growth by preparing to meet new and evolving client needs. 3 If you are an MSP seeking to grow or maintain your business in 2013 and beyond, market conditions are such that there will be many opportunities to acquire new clients or expand on the services provided to your existing clients. Your challenge is in differentiating your business from thousands of other providers in the marketplace who share your ambitions. A recent Wall Street Journal article revealed that there are now over 300,000 independent IT consultants and 114,000 small IT services companies providing support to small and mid-sized businesses (SMB).4 There may also be new competitors on the horizon as technology retailers such as Staples, Apple, and Best Buy eye the SMB marketplace and work to develop offerings that will compete with the traditional managed...
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...technical support and problems solving services * Provided technical support via phone, the internet, or in person * Diagnosed software-hardware problems * Accurately documented all technical support and customers help-desk interaction * Prepared reports and stayed up to date regarding system information * Strategically install and upgrade network computer applications, upgrade and maintain computer hardware, and perform critical backups * Enhance database performance, perform restores, implement recovery procedure, handle performance tuning, and conducted regular system backups * Provided networking desktop support and perform mainframe and account maintenance tasks * Handled technical troubleshooting within an enterprise environment, including system crashes, slowdowns and data recovery * Ability to perform task independently under pressure * Provided installation support and services to setup, install, move, add and change for PC hardware and software. * Provided IT support at local and remote audio and video conferences when needed. * Provided detailed descriptions of issues in trouble ticket system and followed up diligently to ensure swift resolutions. * Provided technical help desk support for AAIC’s hardware/software infrastructure * Provided Point of Sale technical support for our Independent Agency channel to issue New Business to enable AAIC profitable growth. * Provided computer help desk support via telephone...
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...2. We have to give the training to our staff regarding the information in user manual, so that they can handle the problems and giving them quick response to their problems. . Help Desk Plus gives a provision to add resolutions for all the requests that have been posted. These resolutions can be directly converted to knowledge base articles that are grouped under the solutions head. If your help desk team has already added such knowledge base articles to the solutions section, then you can search for solutions specific to your problem and fix it. Thus, the solutions module serves as a knowledge base to find solutions for known problems using the keyword-based search. 3. They should be given a quick link to reset the password, if customers...
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...a part of our daily life. Research has become increasingly important for the field of business today. Company or Institution must base their statements on verified facts. In addition one might be able to absorb and learned this research study. The literature and studies cited in this chapter tackle the prospects of Company and Institution, as well as the process of Computer monitoring system. FOREIGN LITERATURE AND STUDIES There has been a significant amount of previous work done in the monitoring of computer hardware device. In particular, Mohammed EL Shobaki conduct a study, “On-chip Monitoring for Non-Intrusive Hardware/Software Observability” bears the most similarity to this work. In this thesis work the authors propose a solution to the problem where the monitoring and troubleshooting of computer hardware device become important part in maintaining observability of the computer system. He stated that today’s computer-based products are complex and require extensive efforts to design and test. They are complex because they comprise many components, complex software and hardware, and features a lot of functionality. This is a trend which is clearly seen in the consumer electronics market, and in state-of-the-art industrial systems. The development of these products tends to be as challenging as it is increasingly time consuming, expensive, and error-prone. Therefore, the developers need to cut down the development time and improve quality, which turn, demands better tools...
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...http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670148/a-green-desk-powered-by-the-person-sitting-at-it#1 The article I have chosen is “A Green Desk Powered By The Person Sitting At It”. Eddi Tornberg is the inventor of this desk that uses the potted plants, heat, and motion from your body to create energy to power the desk but it still has a long ways to go. The prototype only creates enough energy to power a small laptop for a short amount of time. The carpet has a special element in it that creates energy when you walk or roll on it. The chair has a special film that captures energy from the metal heating up while you are sitting at the desk. The plants in the area around the desk somehow serve as a microbial fuel cell. As of right now all the elements that make up the desk are very simple design and appear to not be very practicable for the common user. There are cords running from the chair, flowerpot, and rug to the desk. These cords transport the energy created, to the desk, which are accumulated and converted into usable energy. The desk has three outlets to plug into your devices. Mr. Tornberg hopes that one day he will get his prototype to have it mass marketed and make it part of our day to day living standard. He hopes that a major furniture building company will pick up on what he is doing and start mass producing furniture that can help our electrical needs in the future. My personal opinion is that green energy is coming. As our...
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...WRITE UP July 14, 2012 Executive Summary Pagoda.com, an internet service provider, needs to make a decision as to whether or not the company should outsource its online help desk service to a firm in New Delhi, India. Pagoda.com caters to individual consumers and small businesses who require a high level of service and are willing to pay a premium for it. Pagoda.com offers state-of-the-art email applications and web building software, as well as plenty of storage space and fast access via its high-speed servers. Pagoda's customers are more concerned with the high quality service that they receive than they are with the costs associated with it. Their customers would more than likely discontinue their service with Pagoda as soon as it is observed not to be up to the quality of standard which they expect. Pagoda has several alternatives to choose from which include implementing the new service without notifying their customers and hoping for a seamless transition, offering their customers the choice to try the new firm and running both services concurrently, to choosing not to do anything and continue to run the online help desk service in-house. In conclusion, Pagoda.com has a lot to consider while trying to make the decision as to whether or not they should outsource their online help desk services to the firm in New Delhi, India. Due to the nature of their business success being highly contingent upon the level of customer satisfaction and retention rates, Pagoda...
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...Questions Chapter 1 1. An increasing dependence on computing technology and the complexity of computing technology. 2. A single point of contact within a company for managing customer incidents and service requests. 3. To enable people and businesses to continuously use the computing technology they acquired or developed. 4. Technical support was considered a necessary evil that disrupted the development of new products and systems. 5. (1) Developers missed deadlines because they were being diverted to technical support calls, leaving little time for their primary job of programming. (2) Information was not being captured, so developers had to discover the same solution again and again. (3) Recurring problems were neither identified nor resolved. (4) Technology users, who expected quick and accurate solutions to their problems and requests, were extremely dissatisfied when their demands were not met. 6. Vendors began offering discounts to customers who “screened” calls internally before calling the vendor. 7. A customer can be either internal or external to a company. 8. Customer support involves helping the customer understand and benefit from a product's capabilities, not just installing and fixing the technology. 9. (1) The rapid commercialization of the Internet. (2) Increasingly more affordable and portable computing technology. 10. company size, company goals, and customer expectations 1 11. Formal support enables a company to maximize its technical resources and ensure...
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...Project Plan a. Brief Overview of Company i. Describe the Business Atlas Financial is a world leader in execution and clearing services for exchange-traded, over-the-counter derivative products, non-derivative foreign exchange, equities, and fixed-income products. Atlas Financial offers customized solutions in the Forex and derivatives markets to a wide range of clients, including: financial institutions, corporations, hedge funds, asset managers, professional traders, and private/retail clients. Atlas Financial operates in 14 countries on more than 70 exchanges, providing access to the largest financial markets in the world. Atlas Financial is the leader by volume on many of these markets by delivering access across multiple markets and geographic regions, along with a breadth of product offerings and extensive product knowledge. Atlas Financial focuses on helping clients define and execute their trading and hedging strategies and capitalize on market opportunities. ii. Organization Atlas Financial is your typical hierarchical organization in that it has a chief executive officer, other executive officers, a board of directors, and other managers down the line. iii. Revenues Atlas Financial reported $2.9 billion in total gross revenue for the 2009 calendar year. iv. Expenses In 2009, Atlas Financial reported total expenses of $1.26 billion...
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