Micro-Applications and Micro-Administration
In the first part of this series, we talked about how to set your help desk up for success with the basics of a strong help desk platform and best practices for knowledge sharing. Today we are going one step further with micro-applications and micro-administration, which empowers help desk personnel to work with the IT department to be more productive and capable.
In every business there are people with varying levels of access privileges. Only a few members of the organization will have full access to the inner workings of the IT infrastructure, owing to security risks. Your organization, after all, does not want to allow just anyone to unlock servers, networks, hard drives, databases, and other critical resources.
What that means is that when a help desk issue involves an area requiring high-level access, help desk personnel have to wait for someone (i.e., an expert IT person, with secure and privileged access to systems) to unlock the infrastructure to perform an IT support task. These kind of expert IT people are generally not just sitting around waiting for a help desk request, which means that support services tend to bottleneck in these areas.
If you think of your IT organization as a family you can imagine that the high-level authorized IT staff would represent the parents in your family. In this IT family the help desk staff (i.e., the staff without privileged system access) are like the young children. Parents have to do everything for young children. Likewise, authorized IT staff members have to do everything for the help desk personnel who don’t yet have the knowledge to safely manage risky access. And as with nurturing children, the parents in this IT organization have opportunity to nurture the help desk staff so they can grow and learn to be more-and-more productive.
The more you empower someone who is learning, the more they retain, and ultimately, everyone should be fulfilled: the help desk staff is fulfilled by being able to handle tasks on their own without having to wait, and the IT personnel are fulfilled by being able to focus time on higher value projects rather than just handling help desk requests.
Micro-applications and micro-administration provide the framework for help desk staff to learn and grow and securely handle mundane tasks, leaving high-level IT staff to handle bigger picture issues.
How to Implement Micro-Applications and Micro-Administration
It is important to your business to protect access and ensure that users only inhabit the roles and permissions that are required to do work. Too much access and too-widely dispersed privileges, and your organization is running the risk of inadvertently letting someone change something, delete something, or access something that they should not see. It makes perfect sense to gate access in order to minimize problems, but reducing access for help desk professionals naturally slows down problem-solving.
GroupLink® PowerShare™ puts the power of micro-applications and micro-administration in the hands of your IT department and help desk personnel, thus solving the problem of access without actually increasing permissions for unauthorized staff.
With a simple and easy-to-use console, help desk personnel can access IT scripts and routine tasks that have already been set up and validated by high-level access IT professionals. Micro-administration gives help desk professionals the ability to clear out issues and resolve tickets without actually increasing their access rights, so critical infrastructure remains untouched. At the same time, IT staff who would have had to stop their work to step in and assist the help desk are able to stick to their high-value projects. Neither party has to wait on the other, nor do end users have to wait as long for a solution.
Micro-applications enable individuals or small teams to do things without expensive development costs. With GroupLink PowerShare you can use scripting languages your IT department already knows and utilizes, including PowerShell, Python, BASH and others. The IT department simply creates the script, allowing for parameters, if needed, to be entered when run, and then access to execute that script can be shared with whichever selected users need it, with access, version control, distribution, security and auditing handled by the program. Simply put, help desk staff can run IT department scripts and get the desired results without having to ask the IT staff for their permissions and access to let it run. This saves everyone’s time on all levels, and increases teamwork and productivity.
GroupLink is pleased to offer this platform so your organization can make the most of its resources, training, and personnel. We like to see our clients thrive, and we know that streamlining help desk operations and allowing more time for IT professionals to pursue impactful projects is a clear path to success. Our goal is to help your organization find the efficiencies and productivity that add up to success, without sacrificing customer service, deliverables, or your budget. GroupLink software makes all the difference.
Contact us for more information about how our software can change your company for the better, today.