In the many years I have worked with Multi National Corporations (MNCs), I have given my customers and my colleagues and team members the best solutions technology and IT can offer, with well recognized successes and value.  However, the most valuable experience I have gained during those years, is my closest customers sharing and teaching me about the difference between a “Technology Solution”, and a “Business Solution”.  This I hope to share with you in this CIO Express article.

An engineer writes a “Technology Solution”, whereas a consultant writes a “Business Solution”.

If you can understand this statement above, you can easily see the difference between having a technology solution and having a business solution.  Simply put, a technology solution solves the problem at hand, and to be fair maybe the best solution the engineer can create.  But a business solution considers the business (operations, demands, values, and impact) as an integral part of the solution, presenting a more effective and business driven solution.

“Service Desk Data is a Gold Mine”.

I think most of you share the same awe (敬畏) feeling when reading this statement from Kato-san (Gamutsoft’s EVP).  To some it may seem a great exaggeration, but to me it is the ultimate value of the service desk, and if successful the tremendous business advantages you can gain from the service desk data, as if you have “struck gold”.

“Is your service desk collecting all the data in the first place?”

I asked this question because in my experience transitioning and transforming service desks in the past, even before the question “how to retrieve and make use of the data?”, there is just not enough data collected by the service desk operation.  Consider the following typical service desk incident flow, and the amount of data that could have been collected.