Federal help desk operations get help

Federal help desk operations get help

ksaldarini@govexec.com

Federal help desk staffers, who provide everything from computer support to information about White House policy, have a new resource available to share information with each other.

Daryl Covey, manager of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's next- generation weather radar hotline, has created an online federal help desk registry at www.fedhelpdesk.osf.noaa.gov.

"There's a huge body of best practices and knowledge" about how to operate help desks, Covey said. But many people are not aware of how large the federal help desk sector is, he said.

Covey said the registry is not limited to computer systems help desks but is meant to cover all federal help desk sites, regardless of the type of system or service involved.

The registry will allow help desk staffers to share information about customer service, support technology, problem tracking databases, telecommunications systems, answer automation and more.

While private firms, including most Fortune 500 companies, share information through trade associations, the federal sector had no equivalent resource. "This is something I thought just needed to be done," Covey said.

Membership in the registry is free to all federal help desks. Profiles of registered users will be compiled and shared with all registrants for networking purposes. Registrants can call one another to benchmark data with other help desks, to share experiences with different software, or to ask for advice, Covey said.