People & Organization
Our previous columnist, Annemarie, has left the company and I will be taking over her column. Annemarie had quite some experience with columns. I, on the other hand, have a little less. It seemed like a good idea to have a chat with Annemarie over a glass of wine. She had plenty of useful tips: take your time when writing, don’t wait until the last moment, pick a topic that is close to your heart and so on.
More and more organizations are trying to improve process efficiency across several departments. In this edition of TOPdesk Magazine, we close our triptych of case studies examining how HR departments can use TOPdesk to facilitate interdepartmental collaboration. We will take a closer look at creating and sending surveys in TOPdesk.
On 9 May, TOPdesk organized an interactive session on Change Management, in cooperation with Brabant South-East control room’s Control Room and Communication Technology Department, aimed at the IT department managers from five other control rooms. During this afternoon session, TOPdesk consultant Carolien Kleijer demonstrated the latest version of Change Management, and there was a lively discussion on structuring change processes for control rooms.
People are naturally conservative. No, wait, let me rephrase that. People are naturally inclined to do things in a certain way. Anyone who considers travelling through Nepal with nothing but a backpack would probably not consider themselves conservative.
When a manager hires a new employee, he has to arrange a multitude of things before the new worker can get to work. He needs to go to HR for staff details, to Facilities to arrange a work station, mobile phone and key card and to the IT department for a laptop and a network account. This is time-consuming and not very efficient. However, if supporting departments were to work together more closely, the end user would only have to send a single request.
'Yes, but why?' I was recently asked this question by a four-year-old child, who continued to repeat the question about twenty times in the course of several minutes.
Voluntary or forced, many district councils are beginning to work together intensively or even merge, which can be a long and challenging process. A service management tool like TOPdesk can support the work of local authorities – before, during and after a fusion.
After suffering from some recent bad publicity, the time has come for service desks to go on a charm offensive. We spoke with three successful service desks that regularly receive positive feedback from their clients and we asked ourselves: What’s the secret of their success?
Over the past decade, a growing number of organizations have been transforming their working practices. Traditional office space is being replaced by lounge areas and quiet rooms; permanent workplaces are disappearing in favour of flex-working and working from home. The world of work is slowly changing, but what are the origins of this New World of Work? And what impact does it have on organizations?
It was going to be a beautiful and calm day at sea. The crew had worked hard all day and the ship’s hold was filled to the brim with fresh fish. The captain was satisfied with the routine and efficiency with which his men had worked. He was just going to haul the dragnet one last time before heading home. But then suddenly the sky became overcast.
Bringing multiple departments together under one roof in a Shared Service Centre (SSC) has turned out to be not just another passing trend, but a serious solution to the problems that many organizations face.
TOPdesk software automates the knowledge intensive processes that are present not only in IT and facilities departments but those that can be found in HR departments as well. Living up to the motto ‘Practice what you preach,’ the HR team at TOPdesk has been using TOPdesk software to improve the quality of their services for the last few years. For this article, we talked to our own HR team to see how their processes have been streamlined by the introduction of TOPdesk.
TOPdesk software supports both IT and facilities processes. Recently, many clients have been approaching us to cooperate with them on merging these two processes. While some clients appoint the term ‘shared service centre’ to this merge; others prefer to use the term ‘service point’. Prior to such collaboration, a grand project plan – which should save time and money and enhance efficiency - is usually formulated. The fundamental psychological impact of this merge for the employees is, however, often left out of the big picture.
These days, more and more IT and facilities management (FM) departments are joining forces and working together with one software tool. The reasons can be financial or logistical in nature or it can be that, by working together, a higher level of service provision can be attained. This article discusses how we can best go about succeeding in such a collaboration effort and the factors that need to be considered. We will start out by taking a look at the business case.
To improve customer service, many governmental agencies are looking to digitalize their services and procedures.
Geert Hofstede was one of the first to conduct in-depth research into cultural differences. Among other subjects, he examined the differences between how IBM workers around the world viewed matters such as time, hierarchy, success and assurance. Now, more than 20 years later, businesses still use his book as a guide. When operating outside of the continent, European companies often expect to deal with large differences in culture.
Maintaining a strong base of satisfied customers is an important objective for any business operation. This is especially true for service management organizations; in fact keeping customers satisfied is often their primary objective. Each organization has its own methods, but learning to capitalize on new trends in customer satisfaction will keep your organization ahead of the game.
Last month, I went out for dinner. The menu was exciting, the view fantastic and the service attentive. While the bill ended up being higher than expected – thanks, in part, to a liberal amount of good wine – at the end of the night we patted our bellies in satisfaction and stepped smiling into the taxi to go home.
A new service desk can be a source of stress for both the service desk employees and their other colleagues.
Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that 75% of all IT projects in the UK fail. The main reason for this appears not so much to be a failure of the technology or the inefficiency of work processes, but because of insufficient attention for the people within an organization.
Outsourcing – contracting of work with the intention of increasing the efficiency of an organisation or reducing costs – has been around for quite some time now.
Customer satisfaction is a concept which is met with approval on all sides. Yet at the same time it is as subjective as it is freely interpretable. Because what is customer satisfaction?
In the endless forest that is service management, you can get lost in no time. The forest seems to grow continuously. There is a new procedure or guideline lurking behind every tree.
When deciding whether or not to outsource company processes offshore, many criteria play an important role. Each country has its own ‘specialty’.
In October 2006, the Dutch Nyenrode Business University established a chair in Outsourcing.
Wolter Smit, one of TOPdesk's two directors, on a daily basis comes in contact with organisations that outsource IT services.
In the world of IT, developments in technology appear as quickly as they disappear. Some developments are revolutionary, while others are simply hype.
The freedom to decide where and when to work and finding a better balance between work and free time; in the UK teleworking is taken advantage of by around 7.4% of the workforce.