Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By John E. Burke, Network World, 11/28/06

Although we often focus on technologies to aid in the management of branch offices, from remote management appliances to bandwidth optimizers and wide-area file services accelerators, it is important not to overlook the other key aspect of providing support to remote offices: the organizational structure within which system administrators, application managers, and network engineers work. With the increasing probability that all enterprise applications will be delivered to the remote office over the WAN, one of the most important issues is how to structure support of enterprise applications for remote users.

The basic models for extending support on core applications to remote users are:

* Centralized: Central staff supports all users.
* Centralized plus distributed: A mix of central and onsite staff supports remote users.
* Outsourced: A service provider supports remote users.
* Outsourced plus in-house: Combines service provider support with centralized and/or distributed in-house support.

Which support model a company builds on can have dramatic effects on the amount of time – and therefore the amount of money – spent on managing performance for and resolving support problems with remote use of enterprise applications. In its latest benchmark research, Delivering the Enterprise: Service Delivery and Management, Nemertes has explored those effects.

Looking directly at the fraction of time central staff spend on service delivery and management issues for remote users, for example, we saw that the combination of central and onsite staff results in the lowest investment of central staff time, a mere 13.1% on average. Using central staff alone was next best, followed closely by adding service provider support to the mix of central and distributed staff – neither model consumed even a quarter of central staff time with remote support issues. Mixing central staff only with outsourcers resulted in the highest investment of central staff time – over 30%, more than twice as much as the mixed central/distributed model.

Another aspect of service delivery that shows distinct variation across support models is the time it takes to solve problems users report in enterprise applications, a key factor in both user satisfaction and in the understanding how central staff time is being spent. In the support structures that involve any in-house staff (that is, leaving aside the fully-outsourced remote support solution), once again the mix of staff onsite, whether in-house or outsourced, and central staff comes out best, with significantly lower times to identify and to resolve problems as they arise. Compared to a purely centralized model, the elapsed time to resolve problems is 40% lower when outsourced staff onsite supplement central staff; it is a whopping 80% lower when in-house staff onsite work with the central staff.

Of course, the costs of placing staff onsite at all branches, whether outsourced or in-house, is high and getting higher as the number of branches grows each year. That cost, though, has to be balanced against the costs of not placing support onsite, a cost primarily paid by the central staff and the end users, in the form of time: time spent on support issues, time spent waiting for issues to be resolved. If the time costs can’t justify IT staff onsite everywhere, they can probably justify staff onsite in some locations and can certainly justify spending on tools to enhance the remote management and support abilities of the central staff.