I work in the Application Management Business Unit at iStone. A part of the company that is all about “customers being able to sleep at night”. Our mission is to keep the customers IT systems up and running and to act fast during unexpected disturbances.
In other words: we are experts in monitoring your IT environment. The minute something fails, we will be notified, often before you notice it yourself. A bit like super agents of IT, if you would.
Step one
Each reported irregularity goes to our service desk to which you can also call directly. Here, you will find staff with broad competencies – but also with specialist competence.
We also support one another with competency within the company. This means that the service desk can solve many of the incoming cases immediately. It has to be something exceptionally difficult and unusual for it to go to the next level.
The "solutions team"
The next level consists of a “solutions team”. On this level it’s really about being the right people in the right place and typically this involves people that have worked on the start-up of the customer’s project, who know the customers well and have built the solution that they use.
The level above specialists consists of all of iStone, i.e. the entire organization’s competency gets involved in case of unique and unusual problems in order to help the customer out.
A continuous maintenance work
Our job is, for the most part, about a constant, ongoing system maintenance and a continual effort to improve.
A lot of work is being done to find and identify the root cause of different symptoms and to progressively eliminate them. This continuous maintenance work, in combination with the constantly on-going dialogue with the customer, is the core skill within our area. Long-term changes of customers systems are partly made as a response to recurring problems received by the service desk, and partly come from specific requests from the customers – for example when a new function is needed.
The system that the customer is using is not there for the individuals themselves, but for the entire company. Many of the problems that we solve stem from how the users handle the system. For example, they can use a function in a way that it was not intended for or tested for initially. So the most important part of our job is to meet the customer’s challenges, in the reality of the customer and based on the customer’s needs. We are the oil in the IT machinery of the customer.
No dramatic rescue operations
We are most satisfied with our job when the follow-up meetings with customers take about 15 minutes and everything is working smoothly and the developments are coming along according to plan.
We prevent dramatic rescue operations by carrying out constant and thorough surveillance, fine-tuning and system development.
So that the lights are always green.
