About 30 years ago, I worked for a multi-national IT company and one of our buildings burned to the ground. This building included a data center that supported lots of essential services, and yet most of the people who used those services were unaware that anything had gone wrong until they heard about it from colleagues. The IT services seamlessly failed over to other locations and everyone was able to keep working.

Creating truly resilient services took a great deal of effort back then, so this was a great tribute to our state-of-the-art technology, and, perhaps more importantly, to the excellence of our continuity planning. But there have been major improvements in both infrastructure and service architecture since then. A combination of cloud infrastructure and loosely coupled service architecture means that it’s fairly easy nowadays to build IT services that can survive the loss of a building. Managers know that their services will continue to run even in the event of a disaster, so they often don’t see the need to invest in IT service continuity and don’t devote much of their time to continuity management.

This is true as far as it goes. But there are still aspects of an organization’s IT services that won’t survive a disaster without good continuity plans in place. And one of the most important of these is your service desk. If your technology is all working perfectly, but your users can’t get help when they need it, then they aren’t going to be very happy. And keeping users happy is exactly what your service desk is for!

So, what do you need to do to make sure your service desk can still operate in an emergency?

What do you need to do to make sure your #servicedesk can still operate in an emergency? @StuartRance explains in this blog. Click To Tweet

Consider your service levels

The first thing you need to do is to decide what you consider to be the minimum acceptable service desk to have in place immediately after a disaster. Maybe support via an online portal would be sufficient, or maybe you absolutely have to provide support by telephone, or some other channel that is essential for your users. This is a topic for discussion with your governing body, to ensure that you don’t over-invest, or under-invest, in continuity arrangements.

Consider your technology and your people

Once you know what provision you want to have in place, you can think about how to ensure you can offer this. You’ll need to think about technology such as telephony and the service desk platform, as well as connection to any monitoring technology that you use. You’ll almost certainly need to provide some infrastructure, e.g. office space and desks, car parking, etc. And most importantly, you’ll need people. Don’t forget that your people may have been impacted by the event that caused the loss of service, and you can’t simply assume that everyone will be willing and able to just pick up their work from an alternate site. They may have been injured or traumatized by the event, or they may need to go home to look after others, depending on the nature of the disaster. Your continuity plan has to be sufficiently flexible to cope with the loss of critical people, as well as the loss of critical technology and infrastructure.

@Stuart Rance looks at the topic of continuity planning and why you need to make sure your #servicedesk can still operate in an emergency. Click To Tweet

Consider your failure scenarios

Next, you need to think about all the different failure scenarios that might impact you. Talk through how you’d respond to each of these scenarios. Ideally, you should involve the people who would be involved in recovering the service desk to help identify things that might go wrong and to improve the plans. But you can’t be confident about any plan that hasn’t been tested, so you need to think about how you’ll manage that. Ideally, you’d do a full test of your plans, but, depending on the resources you’d need, this might not be practical; still, test what you can. Some testing is better than no testing at all.

Consider your communication plan

Finally, you need to communicate. Everyone needs to know what to do in case of an emergency – having the steps written down in a file that no one ever bothers to look at simply won’t do. If you’re serious, you need to keep rehearsing – and continually improving – the plans to make sure that people remember them and keep them up-to-date.

In summary

Your service desk needs a continuity plan and you need to:

• Make sure you have a good understanding of your organization’s governance requirements before you start planning
• Consider how you’ll provide technology, infrastructure, and people
• Develop and test scenarios for likely emergencies
• Communicate, rehearse, and improve your plans to keep them fresh

If you follow these simple guidelines, your service desk should be able to survive any emergency.