Comments on: Does your IT department use various social communication tools? Sat, 15 Mar 2014 07:34:24 +0000 hourly 1 By: James Murray Sat, 04 May 2013 18:20:28 +0000 I read the article and it sounds to think that Face Book could replace a ticketing system, but it’s just not scalable. The bigger the network grows, the more important it is for the IT department to have a change control system. The “Old School” ticketing system is an important part of the change control system.

Imagine an incident comes through. Is this a known or unknown incident? Social media can’t tell you. The KB articles associated with the ticket have solutions for all the known problems. So if the problem starts at tier 1 and moves through to tier 3, how does the tier 3 technician know about the Face Book conversation the tier 1 technician had with the customer? Without a ticket system each tier has to start the troubleshooting all over again. This doesn’t reduce ticket time it extends ticket time.

Now consider unknown issues… again… assuming that the conversation was done through Face Book… how does root cause analysis happen? We have to save those Face Book conversations in some system for them to review. So does the technician have to read everything in the conversation? Wouldn’t it be better to only read the summary each technician wrote and review the dump files?

I’ve worked to re-organize multiple IT departments. Improving tools, improving change control, documentation quality were all part of the solution. But never adding 3rd party social networking tools.

The best leveraging of tools I’ve seen are those that integrate Lync with their other systems. Lync ties all the communication together. Saves email, allows long distance face to face meetings and records everything and integrates with the ticketing system.

Forays into social networking tools are work-a-rounds for a system that is failing and needs to be re-organized not a replacement for a well organized system.

By: KevinBeaver Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:26:00 +0000 I haven’t seen social media used in this manner with my clients but suspect it could be useful as long as employees aren’t sharing private information in the public domain.