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Self Service and Self Help IT Not Fulfilling Potential

Rex McMillan

While self-service and self-help IT are in common practice, about half of organizations surveyed are still struggling with full deployment and realizing its value, according to a new report by Ivanti and the Service Desk Institute (SDI). Time restrictions, and lack of appetite from end users and enterprises, are key hurdles in achieving more deployment, according to respondents.

Analyzing responses from 25,000 service desk professionals, predominantly in the UK, the survey found that uptake of both self-service and self-help services has grown due to a need to improve user experience and save time.

While end user uptake has been slow because of a continuing preference for "human touch," respondents cited several major benefits of these services such as better user experience, reduced call volume, 24/7 support, and a better perception of the service desk.

Key findings of the report were:

■ 74 percent of service desk professionals use self-service (a 10 percent increase from 2013) and 58 percent offer their users self-help.

■ The largest motivation driving the implementation of both self-service (90 percent) and self-help (81 percent) is improving services to the end user.

■ Uptake on the end-user side is slow, with 83 percent of users preferring to call the service desk rather than use self-service, and 88 percent preferring to call the service desk rather than use self-help.

■ Respondents overwhelmingly claimed this was due to a preference for "human touch" (72 percent regarding self-service and 88 percent for self-help) but a lack of marketing awareness within the service desk could also be a factor (i.e. professionals are struggling to build an understanding of the role and value of these tools.)

■ The biggest obstacle to implementing both self-service (50 percent) and self-help (53 percent) within organizations is time, closely followed by a lack of appetite from end users and the business (43 percent self-help and 40 percent self service.)

Ollie O’Donoghue, SDI Industry analyst and author of the report, said, "As industry trends change and new generations enter the enterprise IT user base, the demand for self-help and self-service capabilities will undoubtedly increase. Both have an integral role to play in supporting the modern service desk, and organizations armed with the experience and knowledge of a vendor organization, and supplied with the right tools, will undoubtedly overcome the obstacles facing them when implementing these tools."

Self-Help Report Implications

This report raises a very important point – that the customer (and what they want) must be at the heart of any strategy. When developing any service management technology, it is imperative to make meeting business and user demands the priority.

Modern service delivery requires that stakeholders inside and outside of IT be continuously engaged. Solutions such as workflow automation and cloud-based or on premise deployment options enable IT to quickly configure solutions that can increase customer satisfaction.

In encouraging further use of self-help and self-service, organizations need to increase the efficiency of these tools so that the end user is satisfied with letting the "human touch" go. In parallel, more internal communications need to occur so that all stakeholders understand self-service and self-help will contribute business value to the organization.

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Self Service and Self Help IT Not Fulfilling Potential

Rex McMillan

While self-service and self-help IT are in common practice, about half of organizations surveyed are still struggling with full deployment and realizing its value, according to a new report by Ivanti and the Service Desk Institute (SDI). Time restrictions, and lack of appetite from end users and enterprises, are key hurdles in achieving more deployment, according to respondents.

Analyzing responses from 25,000 service desk professionals, predominantly in the UK, the survey found that uptake of both self-service and self-help services has grown due to a need to improve user experience and save time.

While end user uptake has been slow because of a continuing preference for "human touch," respondents cited several major benefits of these services such as better user experience, reduced call volume, 24/7 support, and a better perception of the service desk.

Key findings of the report were:

■ 74 percent of service desk professionals use self-service (a 10 percent increase from 2013) and 58 percent offer their users self-help.

■ The largest motivation driving the implementation of both self-service (90 percent) and self-help (81 percent) is improving services to the end user.

■ Uptake on the end-user side is slow, with 83 percent of users preferring to call the service desk rather than use self-service, and 88 percent preferring to call the service desk rather than use self-help.

■ Respondents overwhelmingly claimed this was due to a preference for "human touch" (72 percent regarding self-service and 88 percent for self-help) but a lack of marketing awareness within the service desk could also be a factor (i.e. professionals are struggling to build an understanding of the role and value of these tools.)

■ The biggest obstacle to implementing both self-service (50 percent) and self-help (53 percent) within organizations is time, closely followed by a lack of appetite from end users and the business (43 percent self-help and 40 percent self service.)

Ollie O’Donoghue, SDI Industry analyst and author of the report, said, "As industry trends change and new generations enter the enterprise IT user base, the demand for self-help and self-service capabilities will undoubtedly increase. Both have an integral role to play in supporting the modern service desk, and organizations armed with the experience and knowledge of a vendor organization, and supplied with the right tools, will undoubtedly overcome the obstacles facing them when implementing these tools."

Self-Help Report Implications

This report raises a very important point – that the customer (and what they want) must be at the heart of any strategy. When developing any service management technology, it is imperative to make meeting business and user demands the priority.

Modern service delivery requires that stakeholders inside and outside of IT be continuously engaged. Solutions such as workflow automation and cloud-based or on premise deployment options enable IT to quickly configure solutions that can increase customer satisfaction.

In encouraging further use of self-help and self-service, organizations need to increase the efficiency of these tools so that the end user is satisfied with letting the "human touch" go. In parallel, more internal communications need to occur so that all stakeholders understand self-service and self-help will contribute business value to the organization.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...