Working Together Can Pay Off

Computerworld - Two years ago, Hughes Supply Inc. in Orlando had two goals in restructuring its IT help desk. The $3.3 billion industrial products distributor wanted help desk staffers to resolve significantly more queries on the first pass, and it wanted to enable business users to answer questions themselves by tapping into a knowledge database.

Two service desks, staffed by 45 IT workers, now answer questions from other Hughes employees about how to use the company's mainframe- and PC-based applications.

Both original project objectives have been met, says Christine Edel, manager of information design and development, thanks to a knowledge-sharing application that contains the most commonly asked questions from end users -- and their answers.

"We went to the subject-matter experts and asked what the most frequent help desk calls were," Edel says. Hughes had documented close to 1,000 of these scenarios when it first deployed the knowledge-sharing application to help desk staffers in January 2000. Seven months later, it rolled out the software to all 8,500 of its employees.

Hughes has mandated that each time a call comes into the help desk, staffers must log it so the software can track how quickly a problem is resolved or assess whether an issue needs to be bumped up to the next level. So now, thanks to the software itself, the company can track how well the knowledge base is working.

Although the ROI goal for the project was 70% first-call resolution -- up from 55% before the project -- the actual number hovers between 75% and 85%, Edel says.

She says end users are also looking up their own questions -- and getting answers -- about 65% of the time.

Tracking Profits

But not every collaborative project nets that type of quantifiable return. Wausau Benefits Inc., an independent health care administrator in Wausau, Wis., implemented PlanView project planning software to help employees in IT, finance and other departments share information about which product lines are profitable. The idea is to use the PlanView-derived information to revamp product lines that aren't making money.

Another goal of the software project is to better manage cross-functional projects within the company, so that the same or similar information doesn't have to be in four different databases, for example. "Everyone can pull up the same information," which should help drive better decisions and make employees more productive, says Kevin Flahive, director of IT.

Flahive says the company hopes to achieve ROI within two years or so but adds that the project has a lot of aspects that