The television sitcom The IT Crowd summed up technology helpdesks for millions of office workers. Techies Roy and Moss took their hands-off approach to problem-solving to extreme lengths, building a machine that automatically answered users’ calls. The pre-recorded advice was always the same: “Turn the PC off and back on again.”

For far too many business IT users, this is far from comedy. An “efficient” helpdesk is one with permanently busy phone lines, where the staff are rude, or their advice is so unhelpful that their long-suffering colleagues have to resort to their own, home-brewed solutions if they want to do any productive work.