I was heading the Desktop Management, which was the outsourcing team that started the first Desktop Outsourcing that has offices throughout the entire world. With offices present in 170 countries.
We were providing technical support along with the IT Infra project. Our committed SLA for support was for 4 hours resolution with a 98% closure rate. It's basically, whenever a call is received by our call center, the call is to be either resolved over the phone or to be assigned to our tech support team to be on-site to rectify the problem within 4 hours since the call was bad.
We were handling an average of 6,000 calls per month.
With the Desktop Outsourcing team, the customer was able to fully focus on their core business in ensuring that they are strategically aligning themselves to be competitive in their industry and look into ways and approaches on how can they deliver their services and products better, whilst knowing that they have the best people at the back supporting them and ensuring that the systems will be up and running.
*They've committed to their clients guaranteeing them 99% uptime SLA. Where they will be penalized should they fail to deliver their committed SLA.
The technical knowledge and skills were the most critical requirements. However, back in that time, there weren't many as we were the first ones that built it.
As such, many tools and features that were developed to enable the team to be able to deliver our commitment to the clients. And this includes SOP & Processes for change management i.e. device/machine replacement or new machine deployment checklists, which includes SOP for asset tagging, user data migration, SOP for handling the incident management where all the activities are tracked and monitored through a ticket raised from the Incident management.
One of the most critical tools was centralized knowledge-based where we are able to disperse technical guides on how to fix a newly found issue. As most of the systems we've built for the customer was the first, no one else would know or have an idea of how to work around them. We worked very closely with Microsoft. Microsoft has assigned a team dedicated to working closely on building the Windows that was able to provide more features like the personal or home version of Windows 95 or 98 but with Enterprise management features like the Windows NT. (During that period, Windows NT was able to support most of the Softwares due to its driver incompatibilities as well as the other libraries). This was how the Windows 2000 OS was equipped to support all the enterprise management features, as well as able to handle all the apps that previously Windows NT couldn't.
Back to the Centralized knowledge base, I had to drill down into a template on how should the guide should be written on, in order for our tech guys from the other side of the world is able to look it up and able to rectify the problem without needing any additional help or additional time required.
During this period, there weren't any reliable search engine tools available. We were working closely with search engines like Google, which is able to index the right information and able to produce search results more accurately.
I have also built the first Wiki during this project to document our entire activities and set up so that it can be easily handed over to the next vendor or the customer to take it over from there.
Since the beginning of the project, the Desktop Outsourcing was supposed to be an ongoing improvement, but in accordance with the ITIL guidelines. There are many processes that seem to be slowing down some urgent tasks. But because the tasks are urgent and critical, all the more, the processes need to be followed as it will include recovery plans, escalations processes should the required tasks or changes on the systems needed to be done.
From my personal experience during the period when the Desktop Outsourcing was first introduced, the main reason systems fail is simply because no proper process was put in place in ensuring the right approvals are given (especially from the stakeholders that are paying for it) and all the risks and especially the 'worst-case scenarios' should be made known to the respective personnel. As they all should know if something happens, how bad could it be.
It seems like it was just yesterday I first joined and started working out the procedures and policies for the desktop outsourcing that was set to manage an entire global team worldwide.
All of these are in-house, as we were also representing Dell, we are expected to produce the required solution by our own
