Choosing Help-Desk Management Software

Help-desk management software is a broad category that encompasses several related applications that give help-desk managers and technicians the tools they need to automate routine tasks, plan intelligently, and control workflow. Our primary focus here is on issue tracking and knowledge management software. Other tools are covered at greater length elsewhere on this site.

Bear in mind, these applications often come rolled together in help-desk management suites or systems management software. Whether you’re investigating an application suite or individual pieces of software, make sure that all of the component pieces are well integrated.

Why Should You Consider Help-Desk Software?

• Help-desk programs give technicians the tools they need to track their activities and better manage their own workflow.
• Many help-desk applications facilitate communication between IT personnel and the end user.
• Tracking support problems can help you discover recurring issues. Are a few computers taking up hours and days of staff time? It might be worth it to replace those machines. Are staff members taking up hours of your IT department’s time with routine questions about core software (e.g., Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook)? This could point to a need for more training.
• Good help-desk management software will produce regular reports that you can use for planning and evaluation. For example, if it takes your technicians three weeks on average to resolve a routine software problem, they may be understaffed, or they might be managing their time poorly.
• If your technicians record their thought processes in a well-organized application, they’ll have a much easier time solving problems when they come up again.

Key Actions to Consider

As with all software purchases, the process begins by talking to colleagues and gathering a set of requirements. Why does your library need a particular application, what do they want it to do and how much can you spend?

Types of Help-Desk Software

TYPE OF SOFTWARE	FURTHER RESOURCES
Issue-tracking software (also known as trouble ticket software) offers libraries and other organizations a way to manage and organize support requests and minor IT projects. When someone calls your help desk, the technician creates a trouble ticket with an incident number and uses the software to record his or her efforts to fix the problem. Also, with each update to the status of the problem, the software can send out automatic messages (usually email) to the end user. Issue-tracking software can report on certain key metrics, such as the average time it takes your technicians to respond to a request and the average time it takes them to solve a problem. Finally, the details of each incident can form the basis of a knowledge management system. Therefore, issue-tracking software and knowledge management software are usually integrated or sold as a package (see below).	Wikipedia has a good overview article on this topic, as well as a comparison of different issue-tracking programs. Slashdot has a long, useful forum discussion, where managers and techies describe their experiences with different programs.
A knowledge management system (also known as knowledge base) keeps individuals and organizations from solving the same problem more than once. Ideally, once a solution has been found, no one in the organization should have to repeat the process of research and discovery. Often, a knowledge management system is simply a different interface to your issue-tracking software (see above). As technicians record the details of each incident, they’re actually creating the knowledge base. It’s important that technicians have an intuitive, well-designed set of categories and keywords to choose from when classifying support incidents. Without that, retrieval becomes difficult. Also, you may want to give non-technical librarians access to the knowledge base so they can solve their own problems. If so, ask about what types of customer and end-user interfaces are available.	Should You Ditch Your KnowledgeBase and Use a Wiki Instead? describes a low-cost, informal approach to knowledge management.
Remote desktop applications allow you to establish a connection with a computer anywhere in the world, see what’s happening on that computer and control it using your mouse and keyboard.	For more information, see our Remote Desktop Software page.
Systems management software actually refers to a suite of IT management tools that have been integrated into a single package. The specific tools and utilities included in a systems management software suite vary from vendor to vendor, but you’ll often find a single package that includes all the other utilities in this list (e.g., asset management, disk imaging, software deployment, etc.).	For more information, see our Installing and Patching Software page.
Disk-imaging software can be used to reinstall the operating system and core software after a hard drive crash or a major software problem.	For more information, see our Disk Cloning page.
Rather than walking from machine to machine or driving from branch to branch with an installation CD every time you purchase new software, consider acquiring a software deployment tool. A software deployment tool automates the installation of other software. More often than not, these tools are part of the systems management software suites mentioned above.	For more information, see our Installing and Patching Software page.
Patch management software is similar to a software deployment tool. Rather than automating the installation of an entire application, patch management programs download and install security patches and other updates.	For more information, see our Installing and Patching Software page.
Asset-tracking tools let you know the exact location of each piece of hardware and software, as long as you’re using it regularly and keeping it up-to-date. It can also record information about the configuration of each computer, who supports it, service agreements and other metadata. Ready access to this can save your IT department time, but it’s also useful for managers and accountants.	For more information, see our Asset Management page.