Has your help desk gone mainstream? If it hasn't, it could be costing your company money, according to a report published by Forrester Research.

Despite the fact that businesses are relying more than ever on Internet- and intranet-based applications, many help desks and customer service operations remain fractured and disconnected from the rest of the IT department.

"Help desks sprang up as a result of different needs within the organization, and now they are often a collection of technology fiefdoms," said Matthew Nordan, an analyst in Forrester's computing strategies group.

Suppliers of help desk software and services are attacking the problem with products designed to consolidate or even "out-task" help desk and customer service functions across a large enterprise. Several of these solutions, including new software and services from GWI Software Inc., Primus Communications Corp. and Remedy Corp. were on display at the Systems Support Conference and Exposition earlier this month.

Remedy's Strategic Service Suite, for example, combines asset management, change management, service level reporting, IT purchasing and Year 2000 assessment applications with traditional help desk and trouble-ticketing tools.

"We're pretty impressed with [the Remedy suite]," said Tim Dempsey, project manager at TASC Inc., a $400 million systems integration company and a Strategic Service Suite beta site. "We think it will be a significant improvement over what our support organization was doing before."

Primus, meanwhile, is taking a different tack on the service desk consolidation course: out-tasking. At the SSCE, Primus introduced SolutionSeries.com, a Web-based service that lets companies use the Primus SolutionSeries help desk software without actually implementing it on-site.

With SolutionSeries.com, companies pay a monthly fee of $195 to $245 per user for a full suite of support applications as well as training, consulting, reporting and resolution of IT problems.

Other help desk vendors are using the Web to consolidate help desk and customer service functions. Also at the SSCE, GWI Software announced shipment of its WebHelp! Version 3.0, which lets IT staffers track problem resolution data via 3Com PalmPilots and the Web.

IHS Helpdesk Service Inc. announced a deal with CosmoCom Inc. that will let help desks conduct live conversations and share desktops across IP-based networks. The new service will let IT staffers link directly with users or with other IT staffers across the intranet, rather than using telephone and keyboard at the same time, IHS said.

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