Despite IT automation and the richness of social knowledge, classifying support requests remains one of the most vexing information management problems for support organizations. Solving the problem requires a commitment to logic and to picking the right job for the tool to do, not picking the right tool to do the job.
2. Support the known, study the unknown
ASSUMPTIONS:
• Users are involved in Production. Production is the essence of their work and why they need things.
• Things that are designed well and made well usually work well when used as directed.
• “Support” should always be seen as reinforcement of an intended design and behavior.
• This allows intentions and designs to change, however those changes do not alter the purpose of Support.
• Support presupposes that the intended design and behavior are described in authoritative references.
• Unintended conditions are variances that need to be detectable and comparable against the reference.
• Defects, omissions and errors are the basic intended variances within directed use.
• Mis-use and ab-use are special cases that can create or exacerbate defects, omissions and errors.
• Many things can be observed, tracked, and counted… but not everything that is countable matters. What
matters, primarily, is the things that fit the design or that affect the fit.
OBSERVATIONS:
• The user effort of production also has an intended design and behavior.
• As described above, user support involves infrastructure, but it is not the same as infrastructure support.
4. The Business view of support
Value, motivations and responsibilities are built into expectations about support of IT usage.
Users are aiming for certain production outcomes; providers are aiming for relevant deliveries; and
supporters aim to be responsive. These aims can be logically associated to each other.
User Requirements - define types of outcomes of user functions drawn from capabilities
• User Functions are task-enabling abilities, such as permissions, resourcing, controls, and tracking
Service Definitions - define access and activation of capabilities providing user functions
• Capabilities are operational resources such as tools, apps, solutions
Support Categories - define responses to demand for user function or service capability
• Demands are requests for instructions, supplies, configurations, execution, repairs, and changes
Actual support efforts then consistently make sense to managers in a user-centric context.
9. Reporting the Support
The support tracking model recognizes numerous independent variables that are associated with each other
within support efforts.
The narrative explaining any support effort has a baseline plot. Support tracking collects and records three
main events in the plot.
• <User Effort> involving <desire or issue> instigated <Support Request>.
• When <User Effort> was addressed with <Support Response> during <Infrastructure State>, then <Result>
occurred.
• <Support Response> included <Infrastructure Support> conducted to validate or adjust <Infrastructure
State>.
In the narrative, each variable may be rendered in more or less detail. But, compared to each other, their
generic distinctions always remain the same within the narrative. They do not substitute for each other.
Their independent variability means that the support information system should associate the variables as
multiple dimensions of the event. Statistical insights are readily drawn from this tracking.