Client in focus: Jane Ralph, GuideDogs
2006 marks the 75th anniversary of the first guide dogs to be trained on the streets of the United Kingdom. Jane Ralph, Service Desk Manager for The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, reveals how TOPdesk is used within an organisation where specialist equipment such as screen-reading software, specialist hardware, and Braille keyboards are used on a daily basis.
Tell us a little about your organisation
The official name is ‘The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association’. The Head Office is located in Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom and there are 29 district teams and nearly 400 volunteer fundraising branches throughout the United Kingdom
A national charity, the Association provides guide dogs for blind and partially sighted people. It is not a world-wide organisation, yet related organisations around the world communicate via the ‘International Guide Dog Federation’.
What is your role within the organisation?
I’m manager for the service desk. We are the first point of contact in our organisation for anything IT related.
Which version of TOPdesk do you use?
We’ve been using TOPdesk Professional IS and the Web interface for just over 2 years now.
How big is the service desk in your organisation?
There are ten people in the team and we register around 1000 incidents each month from Guide Dogs staff and trustees. All calls are made to a single telephone number. A technician registers the incident in TOPdesk, tries to resolve it and escalates it when necessary.
For what purpose was TOPdesk installed in your organisation?
Incident management. We wanted to keep a record of incidents and get an idea of how many were registered each month. We especially wanted recurring problems to be highlighted, invoking problem management when necessary.
What’s an example of a problem which occurs frequently?
We have recurring subjects - printers breaking down, people deleting files – that sort of thing. We also receive many calls regarding remote access - our workforce is very mobile, given the nature of the work. Many staff work from home and at clients’ houses to submit reports or pick up email.
What is an example of a typical call at your service desk?
The nature of most calls is not strange, yet the subject of an incident from a member of staff, whom is blind or partially sighted may be difficult to troubleshoot. A guide dog owner whose PC is not working needs to be treated differently. In response to “I can’t dial up or log on” you can’t always just say “Press this button”.
Plans for the future?
We’re interested in inventory. In the short term we wish to develop Incident management and Configuration management further. Once we’ve got that sorted out we can begin implementing Problem and Change management. In the slightly longer term we also want to investigate Operations management.
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