IT support staff recovering from busy summer thanks to lost devices and remote vacation work
RealWire
Tue, 09/05/2017 - 05:44

Chessington, Surrey, 5th September 2017 - While summer might have been the holiday season for many people, the rise of mobile devices and remote working is putting an increasing strain on IT service desks, according to research from Sunrise Software, a leading supplier of IT service management (ITSM) solutions. 67% of respondents in the Sunrise Mobile and Summer Service Desk Survey 2017 said their workloads had increased since the widespread adoption of mobile devices, with 27% saying it had increased by a quarter or more.

The biggest holiday issues mentioned were requests to fix or replace lost/damaged equipment, cited by 70% of people, and security breaches (30%). However, service desks also reported more unusual requests including replacing a mobile phone shredded in a lawn mower, being asked to drive 110 miles to demonstrate how a satnav worked, changing a lightbulb and retrieving a director’s holiday snaps from a crashed hard drive.

According to the research, the rise of mobile devices at work is having a major impact on support desks. 60% of IT service staff complain that their resources are really stretched and that they can’t cope – and this is having a knock on effect on scheduled activities. 93% say they now end up doing upgrades at weekends or out of hours due to pressures on their time.

However, on the positive side the majority (60%) now believe that they are better understood and appreciated by their colleagues compared to five years ago, showing the vital importance of IT support to business today. At the same time 93% say the rest of the business is now more demanding, increasing the pressure to deliver.