IT departments that shift from reactionary fire fighters to becoming proactive business partners find their ticket counts reduced from 20 to 50 percent or more. These reductions can help IT with improved Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and significantly reduce their costs.

The bigger benefit to the enterprise as a whole is that the IT environment is stabilized, users are productive, and IT is now seen as a strategic business partner.

The strategies outlined in Part 1 of this blog may all sound like a great way to turn IT into a strategic, proactive business-enabler, but how can companies turn strategy into reality? Below are three best practices:

1. Set up a command center

World class companies have implemented command centers, or IT hubs, which operate 24/7 and contain specialists from across the many infrastructure disciplines — from server, storage, security, and network, and often application, web, and database teams as well. Frequently missing from the equation, however, are the teams that have an end-user focus, such as Desktop Engineering, End User Services or other desk-side support teams.

When you change your perspective and look at the distributed computing environment as a single entity, there are often millions of dollars tied up in equipment, software, and support. Staffing all disciplines, including the end-user perspective from the client teams, enables greater collaboration and broader visibility.

2. Create a proactive services team

Once the command center is operating at peak efficiency and ticket volumes start to reduce, reassign some of the former reactive desktop staff to a proactive services team. This team is solely focused on "seek and destroy" activities. They hunt the enterprise for issues and trends that may or may not be called into the help desk. They find issues plaguing the environment that the users may not even be aware of. And ideally, they also engage with the user community to determine additional ways that IT can enable the business. This approach will further reduce tickets and continue to bring IT closer to the business.

3. Implement a model office

A big contributor to increased ticket volumes is an inability to accurately assess impact of technology releases prior to production deployment. These updates range from weekly or monthly patches to large transformations like Office 365 or Windows10. Creating a simulated desktop environment where testing can occur before installing software updates on production PCs provides an opportunity to find issues before they impact your users.

In summary, invest the time and effort to build proactive technology teams and provide them with support, the data, and the processes that will transform IT from reactionary firefighters to proactive business partners. Analysis, insights, and automation can go a long way to reducing and preventing business-user trouble tickets. These approaches, when combined with thoughtful enablement, can go a long way to boosting productivity, reducing costs and ultimately growing the business.