Making the IT department (internal) user-friendly

As IT departments evolve into integral parts of day-to-day business operations, IT managers may find that their most important clients work right down the hall.

"Most people change the way they focus on client service for an external client vs. an internal client and that's a big mistake," says Kevin Volpe, group vice president of client care for Gartner. "After all, the productivity loss of an internal client can negatively impact an external client."

For years, IT had little contact with most employees, focusing more on keeping business systems up and running. But today, with nearly all employees using network-linked desktops, laptops or wireless devices, the demand for internal customer support is growing.

"It really is changing a culture because you have to take it from a technically driven environment to a customer service-driven environment," Volpe says. "That doesn't mean you abort the technology side altogether. It means you have to incorporate customer-service skills into technically proficient people."

Gartner uses service-level recognition awards to encourage IT people to shine in customer service and hosts monthly brown-bag lunches to keep end users educated about what IT is doing.

Hunter Muller, principal at Hunter Management Group in Westport, Conn., says IT departments should set internal service-level expectations and then measure themselves against those standards. For example, IT managers can track how long it takes to respond to internal problems and then gauge end-user satisfaction.

In addition, by tracking problems, repeated complaints can be identified. "Develop a list of frequently asked questions and put them, and the solutions, on a Web site so end users can solve problems on their own," says Peter Urban, a senior research analyst at AMR Research.

Perhaps the most important thing the IT department can do, says Chris Gardner, a partner in the IT strategy consulting practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, is to "transition the department from being a cost center to being a value center."

"IT needs to take the initiative more and anticipate user needs, both in terms of where the business is going and where the technology is going," he says.