France Telecom answers call for integrated help desk - France Telecom's use of Answer Systems Inc's Apriori help desk system

Written by zhangyuan January 23, 2008 10:13

Like many large companies, France Telecom dispensed support through a series of corporate help desks, each with its own approach to solving problems. Then the firm centralized the function with a package from Answer Systems.

More and more organization are viewing help desks a one of the most significant ways in which software can both internal communications an productivity.

One of these, France Telecom, national telephone service operator, decided in 1992 to set up a central help desk for all users of its information system. Until then, the Paris-based company ran a clerical system with separate help desks dealing with hardware, networks, operating systems or application problems, said a company official.

Snags were numerous. People would often call the wrong help desk and have to redial. Even if the call went through, queries sometimes got lost or took too long to resolve.

The system was also extremely expensive to run. The different help desks had varied methods for dealing with problems, and databases abounded. In addition, departments billed each other unnecessarily. According to officials, management was unclear about where critical system faults and weaknesses lay.

The goal of the new system was to overcome these problems by combining the functions of the old help desks, said officials. France Telecom drew up a specification, intending to develop software in-house using the Oracle relational database from Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, Calif.

The France Telecom effort to develop the software internally was waylaid when the firm decided to examine the approaches of two external suppliers - the state-owned computer company Groupe Bull, Paris, and computer services provider Humelec Informatique, also in Paris. Bull offered Agatel, a database system, which ported from Bull's proprietary environment to Unix.

For its part, Humelec proposed the Apriori help desk system developed by Answer Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., which was also Unix-based and could be linked to either Oracle or to SQL Server from Sybase Inc., Emeryville, Calif. Though the system was new to the market at the time, Humelec referred France Telecom to a system running at U.S. retailer J.C. Penney, to allay fears.

After evaluating the internal plan and the external proposals, France Telecom chose Apriori, despite what some insiders described as political pressure to select Bulls product. The firm preferred the Humelec proposal because its specification was closer to its own internal plan and because the Apriori system was performing well at J.C. Penney.

According to Claude Vergnes, Humelec's commercial director, the systems integrator was able to install Apriori injust a few weeks. The first configuration was used by 35 support engineers, he said. The software runs on a Sun Microsystems workstation, but will soon be moved to a dual SparcServer 2000 client/server configuration, he said.

Early in 1993 France Telecom chose to extend Apriori to its central support operation. The company bought a 100-user license for that project., success there led to the purchase of a corporate-wide license.

According to France Telecom officials, around 75 people man the help desk. The central support group, considered the second level of support, responds to queries from 140,000 employees about more than 300 applications. The first level is France Telecom's facility in Lyons, where calls are logged in. There, the caller is given an incident number and referred to a problem solver in one of eight other French cities. The service operates 12 hours a day during the work week and also on Saturday mornings.

If the central support group cannot resolve a query, it is referred to a third level of support provided by more specialized divisions of France Telecom or outside experts.

Apriori provides France Telecom with a monthly report on its activities including the total number of calls, and a breakdown of the number per application, Vergnes said. These functions help management focus effort toward areas that need the most attention.

Last year the system handled around 5,000 calls a month, and that number is expected to double by the end of this year. About 80% of calls are returned in less than an hour, said a spokeswoman. The firms objective is to be able to solve 50% of inquiries in less than two hours by the end of this year, said Vergnes.

The wide geographical spread of the systems presents difficulties, noted Vergnes. Frances imperial heritage compels it to cope with calls from such locales as the Antilles Islands and Martinique in the Caribbean Sea, and the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. Since requests for support can come at any time of day, the company has linked its incident-logging systems to a videotex application. This application is accessed through Minitel, a national videotex system that enables the public to have interactive access to a range of computer services by telephone.

Users can call a Minitel number and record their problem on the incident-logging system. The query is transferred from Minitel to the Apriori server The incident is then loaded into a dispatch queue, and an incident number sent back to the caller. When the support team returns to work, one of them calls the user to discuss the problem.

New Way of Thinking

Apriori is said to challenge orthodox thinking about help desks, particularly the widespread assumption that the way of the future will be expert systems based on rules, or case-based systems. Answer Systems has taken out a U.S. patent on an alternative technology it calls Bubble-Up," which it defines as algorithms that identify and respond to the most common help desk problems.

Answer Systems was founded in 1988 by Louise Kirkbride, now the firm's vice president of marketing. The company claims an annual revenue of $4 million and installations at 160 sites worldwide.

Kirkbride believes that the rule-based systems, though good for stable environments where the same questions and answers recur, are not suitable for the fast-changing situations typical of those handled by most help desks. She argues that the nature of the problems handled by a help desk change every six months or so, at much the same rate that technology changes. Answers Apriori acts as a memory aid for the help desk staff by developing a "hit parade" of problems and solutions based on their popularity, she said.

Several leading help desk products take an expert systems approach, including ART-IM from Inference Corp., El Segundo, Calif.; Vantive HelpDesk from The Vantive Corp., Mountain View, Calif.; and Expert Advisor from Software Artistry Inc., Indianapolis.

Humelec Manager Peter Jagger said his firm has found that expert systems require extensive customized programming and can take as long as a year to get a help desk running. He contends that help desks using Bubble-up technology can be built in as little as two weeks.

Responding to Jagger's comments, Mike Thoma, Inference senior vice president for corporate marketing, said, "Bubble-up is a big improvement in the area of decision trees, but decision trees punish you for putting in the wrong answer. Case-based reasoning is more forgiving and still gets you to the right answer."

The Gartner Group, a Stamford, Conn., market research firm, says the market for help desk systems will grow from $160 million this year to $500 million by 1997. According to Gartner, most large organizations have very primitive help desk systems that they will likely replace in the next few years. Demand is also bound to be boosted by a shift to multivendor client/server systems, which are much more complex than their mainframe predecessors.

Accordingly, the number of help desk tools vendors has risen sharply and is now thought to be around 130, most of them offering simple call-tracking systems, observers say.

Humelec's Jagger criticized the lack of involvement by most corporate boards of directors for the decision-making process for the purchase of help desk systems. "The workers know how important it is, but senior managers still don't seem to appreciate the impact on their business," he said.