More and more enterprise organizations adopt self-services portals for employees not only for IT services but also for other service domains like HR, Finance, Security, Facilities, Risk, Compliance, Time registration, Whistleblowing and more. Each domain can have their own terminology. For example, in IT they talk about Requests, Incidents, Problems and Changes and in HR they might talk about HR cases etc. For the purpose of this article, we will refer to all these as tickets.

Often, we see system management implementations that are designed in a way if a ticket is created with the wrong type on for the wrong department the handling service desk will close the original ticket and ask the employee to open a new one. The customer (employee) is bothered with a new ticket-ID every time a new ticket is opened. So, despite it is the same errand the employee will possibly see multiple tickets being opened and closed.

But it doesn’t stop there. Some errands have a more complex flow. This could be a new employee on-boarding request that is starting in HR and as the workflow progresses it will go to other departments like IT for provisioning of IT equipment and to Facilities for providing a workspace and building access etc. For each department many systems create new tickets with new ID’s for the one and same on-boarding instead of assigning tasks that are linked to the on-boarding request.

The challenge is that users are drowning in requests about the same overall work. We call this Ticket Sprawl and this is impacting user and customer satisfaction negatively.