IT Communications: What Each Support Team Should Cover

In a tiered support system, the service desk and the organization’s IT resources play an important role in ensuring the right communication is distributed during an IT incident.

By tailoring communications to each level’s needs, you can ensure the right information is conveyed to key stakeholders, preventing confusion and panic.

Creating a comprehensive strategy as part of your IT incident resolution is an important part of planning that is often overlooked. Targeted alerts can ensure that all key stakeholders and users knows how to deal with the incident, allowing valuable IT resources to focus on dealing with the issue, instead of wasting time answering repetitive questions.

When crafting your communications strategy, here’s what should be covered at the different levels:

Zero Line

This is for your automated services, such as a password change that doesn’t require involving a person. While automation can save time and money, be careful about automating too many services, especially if you need feedback from users in your organization.

If you do a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis, you’ll usually find that the issues created by automating too heavily eliminates any savings. With IT alerts, you’re aiming to inform people and prompt them to take action. When messages aren’t tailored to each unique situation, you create more problems and fail to deliver on the primary goal of communication.

First Line

This line is all about getting the business up and running again by finding workarounds to issues. It usually consists of junior-level people who aspire to become specialized.

You should work to nurture and grow your first-line IT team members, as they can play a key role in bridging the gap between the business and IT. Attrition rates are usually high on the first line, as they’re not technical roles. However, these roles are highly important for improving communication.

Second And Third Lines

This is where you’ll have your specialized resources. The second line is usually looking at specific system in the IT organization, such as database or network administrators, while the third line is more strategic and often consists of architects.

These highly skilled IT team members work on root cause analysis of issues and process improvement. Since these specialized people are often critiquing their own work, good management is needed to ensure efficiency on the second and third lines. People on these lines should also be available for IT maintenance work as well.

Tailored alerts ensure that critical information gets to the right users, preventing wasted time and frustration. Ensure your service desk is using communications to lessen panic and confusion with a comprehensive strategy.

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