A fictional story. The characters, organisations and events are imaginary. The products are real.
The five channels of doom
Amanah Jaya Insurance (fictional, but you know one like it) has 900 staff across 14 branches and an IT service desk of eight people, led by a calm, slightly tired man named Simone.
Simone's team receives IT requests through five channels: email, WhatsApp messages to whichever IT person the requester knows, phone calls (usually at lunch), sticky notes on monitors, and the corridor ambush.
The corridor ambush deserves special mention. A senior manager spots an IT person walking to the pantry and says, "Ah, since you're here..." The IT person disappears for 45 minutes, and the request is never recorded anywhere.
Each channel has its own personality. Email requests are polite and vague. WhatsApp requests are urgent and vague, often with a voice note recorded in a moving car. Phone calls begin with "Sorry to disturb, quick one only," and are never quick. Sticky notes are written in a handwriting style best described as "doctor". And corridor ambushes always start with a compliment, which is how you know something is coming.
Simone once tried to count a week's requests. He gave up on Wednesday, when he found a sticky note inside the microwave.
Monday, 9:02am
Every weekend, things break. Every Monday, everyone discovers this at once.
At 9:02am, the IT inbox has 63 unread emails. Simone's WhatsApp has 28 messages, including one from the CFO's assistant that just says "URGENT" in red, with no further detail. A branch manager in Melaka has been on hold for eleven minutes, listening to an instrumental version of a 1990s pop song.
Three people have reported the same broken printer. Two have asked for the same software. One wants a new laptop because the current one "feels sad".
The desk has service level agreements with the business: critical issues acknowledged in 15 minutes and fixed in four hours. The team kept missing them. Not because they were slow, but because requests were lost, duplicated or noticed late. When the head of operations, Puan Shanti, asked for a report explaining why, Simone could not produce one. The data lived in five channels, one of which was a microwave.
One front door
Puan Shanti brought in Astiostech. The consultant, a cheerful woman named Chloe, spent a day with the service desk, drank their coffee and watched the chaos.
"Your team is good," she said. "Your process is a pasar malam. You need one front door."
She recommended Motadata ServiceOps, because Amanah Jaya needed three things: a named vendor with a formal service commitment for its auditors, ITIL-aligned processes for incidents, requests and especially changes, and AI help to sort a large daily volume of requests.
The first change was slightly brutal. From go-live, IT requests were accepted only through the self-service portal or the IT email address, which created tickets automatically. WhatsApp requests got a polite reply with the portal link. Sticky notes were photographed, logged and ceremonially thrown away.
The corridor ambush was handled by a laminated card every IT person carried: "Happy to help! Please log it here so we don't forget you," with a QR code. The team called it the "anti-ambush shield". Within two weeks, managers had learned to log the ticket first and ambush second.
The AI that needed a few lessons
When a request arrives, ServiceOps suggests a category, priority and team. "Outlook keeps asking for my password" goes to the identity team. "Printer on level 4 jammed again" goes to desktop support and is linked to the other printer tickets, so it is fixed once, not three times.
That was the theory. In the first fortnight, the suggestions were not always right.
A claims officer wrote, "The claims system prints the wrong policy number on the letter." The word "prints" sent it to desktop support, who visited a perfectly healthy printer, twice. A request titled "Urgent: new laptop for CEO's driver" was marked critical, while a genuine outage at the Johor Bahru branch, described politely as "a small issue with the system", sat as low priority for most of a morning.
Simone did not switch the AI off. He made a rule: for the first month, a team lead reviewed every suggestion before it was accepted, and corrected the wrong ones. The team also cleaned up the categories, which had been copied from an old spreadsheet and included both "Printer" and "Printers".
By the second month, the suggestions were right far more often, and the team lead reviewed only the uncertain ones. Simone kept one more rule permanently: anything mentioning a branch outage goes to a human, however politely it is phrased.
Self-service and clocks that tap you on the shoulder
The self-service portal offers answers before a ticket is even created. Type "reset password", and the self-reset steps appear. Many password tickets simply vanished, because people fixed it themselves in two minutes.
Every ticket now carries an SLA clock. The dashboard shows which tickets are healthy, close to breaching, or breached. If a critical ticket is not acknowledged quickly, it escalates to the team lead, and then to Simone.
Nobody has to remember. The system remembers for them.
The CFO's assistant's mysterious "URGENT" now arrives as a proper ticket. It turned out to be a boardroom projector, fixed before the meeting started. Everyone was relieved, especially the projector.
Three months later
At the end of the quarter, Simone produced the report Puan Shanti had wanted. It took 20 minutes, most of which he spent choosing a nice colour for the chart. Breaches were well down, duplicates were linked, and almost every request now had a record.
Each remaining breach had a clear reason in the ticket. Puan Shanti could finally see the real bottlenecks: one ageing claims server and one slow vendor. Both were dealt with the next quarter.
The new Monday
Monday mornings are still busy. Things still break over weekends. But at 9:02am, Simone opens one dashboard. Requests are sorted, assigned and prioritised, and the urgent ones sit at the top with their clocks running.
The Melaka branch manager no longer waits on hold. She logs a ticket on her phone and gets an update when it is assigned.
And the laptop that "felt sad"? It had a failing battery. Sometimes users are right in ways that are hard to put in a ticket.
What this means for your organisation
- Give requests one front door. A portal and an email address that create tickets automatically stop requests from disappearing into chats and corridors.
- Treat AI triage as a suggestion at first. AI can suggest category, priority and team, but a person should review and correct it while it learns your organisation.
- Clean up categories before go-live. Duplicate or vague categories confuse both people and AI.
- Let SLA clocks escalate for you. Visible timers and automatic escalation remove the need to remember every deadline.
- Offer self-service for common fixes. Password resets and simple how-to questions are often solved before a ticket is created.
Frequently asked questions
What is Motadata ServiceOps? Motadata ServiceOps is an IT service management platform for incidents, service requests, problems, changes and assets, with AI-assisted features. Astiostech offers Motadata ServiceOps to Malaysian organisations.
Is Motadata ServiceOps ITIL-aligned? Yes. It supports ITIL-aligned processes, including incident, request, problem and change management.
How does AI help a service desk? AI can suggest a category, priority and team for each request and help users find answers through self-service. Its suggestions improve when the team reviews and corrects them.
What is SLA management? SLA management tracks each ticket against agreed response and resolution times, shows which tickets are at risk and escalates them before they breach.
Should I choose GLPI or Motadata ServiceOps? Astiostech offers both. GLPI suits organisations where zero licence cost matters most. Motadata ServiceOps suits organisations that need a named vendor service commitment, formal ITIL processes and built-in AI. Learn more on the Motadata at Astiostech page.
Book a 15-minute service desk demo
See how Motadata ServiceOps could bring every request into one queue. Book a 15-minute service desk demo.