When troubleshooting computer problems, enterprise workers have long turned to their office mates for help before taking the time to file a formal request for support from the help desk. But the rise of social media, employee mobility, cloud computing and the consumerization of IT have amplified that trend, leading research firm Gartner to predict the "possible end to the traditional help desk."
"Users are crowdsourcing," said Jarod Greene, an analyst at Gartner, which last summer included the potential demise of the help desk in a list of 10 predictions for the IT industry. The firm said people will bypass the help desk and seek answers from co-workers and friends via social media, or they will search for answers themselves on the Web.
"We call it 'Hey, Joe!' support," Greene said. "It's not about opening a help ticket or closing the ticket. It's 'I just need to know how to use this better.' That 'log it and flog it, detect and fix' [help desk] model is dying."
While tech support veterans acknowledge that the help desk is rapidly changing, they also contend that reports of its death are exaggerated.
Franz Fruewald, CIO at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, says most users still call a traditional IT help desk with tech problems. "That has not changed, and I don't see that changing," he said. "Even if things do change, the help desk won't go away entirely. Definitely not."
The archdiocese maintains a help desk staff of nine to serve 125 locations housing a diverse group of some 3,000 users, including teachers, healthcare professionals and cemetery workers.
To be sure, help desks have refined their missions, IT executives say.
In many cases, the process of responding to the most common inquiries -- questions about changing passwords or fixing paper jams, for example -- has been automated. That gives tech support personnel more time to focus on more serious problems, such as network outages and malware attacks.
Bill Benoist, vice president of information services at Calabasas, Calif.-based real estate company Marcus & Millichap, predicted that help desks will continue to play an important role in enterprise IT for some time because many organizations use complex homegrown applications.
"There is no way you can use Google [for problems with custom software] because those applications don't exist except in-house," said Benoist.
The Marcus & Millichap IT shop supports 2,000 people who "are not in the technology field; they're in real estate," said Benoist. "Many of our calls are application-specific and involve user education and training rather than troubleshooting."
He noted that help desk calls are declining, but the decrease is mostly due to improvements in hardware, operating systems and virus protection tools.
Michelle Garvey, CIO at New York-based clothing wholesaler and retailer Warnaco, adds that crowdsourcing isn't likely to help users who have trouble with SAP or Oracle applications, because "those problems are very situation-dependent."
IDC analyst Rob Brothers said there may be fewer people manning help desks in the coming years, but the function will remain critical for a while. "We have no idea about the myriad issues that will arise in the next five years," Brothers said.
Weiss is a freelance writer.
