AUTOMATED ICT HELPDESK

By
HUDSON FRANK SHARARA
H190417X

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree

BACHELOR TECHNOLOGY: HIT400 Project

In the
Department of Information Technology
SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY
HARARE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Supervisor: Mr. Mavuchi

Bachelor of technology (Hons) degree in

information technology 2022-2023
DECLARATION:

Without any doubt, I, Hudson Frank Sharara, hereby declare that the project AUTOMATED ICT
HELPDESK is my own unique and independent work submitted in partial fulfilment of Bachelor of
Technology (HONS) degree in Information Technology at Harare Institute of Technology. I hereby
state that the content is original and unique.
DEDICATION:

I dedicate this project report to God, my never-failing memory, my loved ones, my co-workers, and
my supervisor for all their hard work and support during the research for my project.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

I want to thank the many people who contributed their time, effort, and wisdom to the
development of this project. I also want to express my gratitude to the management and personnel
of the Holiday Inn Mutare for giving me the opportunity to participate in a significant change in the
ICT department by letting me present my work in order to test and perhaps adopt the concept.

I appreciate Mr. Mavuchi, my academic supervisor, for taking the time to evaluate my abilities and
offer suggestions for how to do so.

I also want to thank my family for their prayers and encouragement during my entire course, not
only during the time I was doing research.

Without thanking the whole Information, Science, and Technology department at the Harare
Institute of Technology for their beneficial instruction and the knowledge they have shared with me
throughout this research, I cannot conclude this list. God's blessings on you all.
ABSTRACT:

For the purpose of troubleshooting, diagnosing, maintaining, and repairing computer hardware
and software issues in the hotel industry, an Automated Helpdesk System is intended to
remove some of the obstacles to successfully contacting the Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) technical support team (Holiday Inn Mutare). Communication with the ICT
department is not always guaranteed for they are mostly mobile, at the end of the day slowing
the progress of work within the reporting department and sometimes affecting the whole hotel.
The goal of this study is to create a mobile (to address ICT issues more quickly and effectively for
users) and web-based helpdesk system for effective information dissemination and effective
operation management.

Responsibilities for the ICT department includes, networking and security assurance,
maintaining software and hardware compatibility, provide support to end users of the hotel
systems, and managing ongoing projects and even initiating them. The system users i.e., “staff
or hotel guests” report to the ICT department for any challenges they face which include
software and hardware problems through different platforms including telephone, email, mouth
to mouth, and other ways possible.

KEYWORDS: AUTOMATED, ONLINE HELP DESK TASK MANAGE, WEB-BASED HELP DESK SYSTEMS, HOTEL, ICT
DEPARTMENT

Table of Contents
DECLARARION………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………i

DEDICTAION…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………ii

ACKNKOLEDGEMENT…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..iii

ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..iv

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................6

1.1 Introduction...........................................................................................................................6 1.2

Motivation..............................................................................................................................6 1.3
Problem Statement......................................................................................................................6 1.5
Hypothesis....................................................................................................................................7 1.6
Technical Objectives...................................................................................................................7 1.7
Expected Results .........................................................................................................................8 1.8
Ethics Consideration...................................................................................................................8 1.9
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................8
CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..9
2.2. Related work…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………10 2.3.
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..12 2.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Introduction
 During my internship, I was working at Holiday Inn Mutare. It is one of the biggest hotels
in Manicaland. HIM is under the intercontinental hotels group” IHG”. All subsidiaries
within the IHG brand are connected digitally, and HIM as part of it has digitalized most of
its activities within the domain and has a vibrant ICT department that is responsible for the
maintenance and overseeing of all the systems making sure everything is smooth and
solves all issues happening within the digital environment.
The use of the ICT automated helpdesk system, helps the hotel staff and guests to be able
to have instant problem solving and providing the ICT department with an efficient system
that keeps track of day-to-day reports from the staff and guests making sure all issues are
resolved promptly. Many times, communication between the users and the ICT
department is concluded to be affected by different barriers leading to a situation where
some problems take so much time to be looked into.

1.2 Motivation

The motivation to start this project was upon the challenges I faced as a trainee at Holiday
Inn Mutare. Fact that we were only two in the department of IT, sometimes it was difficult
to cover or keep track of the tasks to be done especially when the workload was more than
the IT personnel were. Even worse, sometimes I worked alone when my supervisor was on
leave or off. Many times, I missed the queries from the staff or even guests and end up
loading up work, and at the end of the day; I had to work extra hours to solve missed
individual complaints about the ICT issues.
There were other times I had to go to work at 2300hr just to plug in the Ethernet cable
properly into the computer for it was a minor issue that the user could have done. So, in the
end, I realized many times individuals would lose their time, maybe waiting for the
department of IT to come to fix a certain problem, maybe which would have been prioritized
or quickly resolved by the user.

1.3 Problem Statement

The IT department is responsible for maintaining all the computerized processes, providing
support, initiating and developing projects, providing service to users of the system, and
providing solutions to problems encountered by the user. Users inform the ICT department
about various issues, including hardware and software problems on different platforms;
telephone, email, or even mouth to mouth. Upon receiving issued problems, the IT
personnel will act to the requests and quickly rectify the issues. The issue is when requests
are more than the IT department can handle. Only two IT personnel are responsible for
receiving calls and emails and resolving technical challenges. However, the problem is most
of the time, ICT personnel will be mobile fixing problems, and they will be no enough time
to open emails or even to be able to deal with IP phones that are always by the desk, which
will lead to users getting late help or resolution due to these barriers. Another challenge is
that the IT manager is not always available to monitor or assess how the ICT Assistant is
working or to measure the success of the completed work promptly. Most of the time many
issues remain unsolved, thus causing conjunction of work within the reporting department.

1.4 Hypothesis

There is need for a system that greatly lessens downtime due to ICT related problems since
hotel services are done in a timely manner, and guests need no delay, mostly. All the
reservations, front desk operations, and housekeeping reports should face no threat from
ICT issues to deliver services promptly
1.5 Technical Objectives

The following are the research's primary goals:

• To provide a tailor-made system that allows ICT personnel to prioritize tasks and create a
knowledge base for future reference by other users.
• To develop a system that minimizes significantly downtime be it the restaurant, bar,
reservation, or admin areas due to ICT-related problems
• To develop a system that can be integrated with the existing form of communication
already in the business convenience purpose, e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook, email, etc. •
Leverage the power of artificial intelligence to develop a Chabot that minimizes between
human to bot interaction
• Develop a system that allows users without smartphones and mobile data or Wi-Fi to get
quick access to ICT helpdesk services.
1.6 Expected Results

• An API that allows users to communicate with a bot through text, WhatsApp and emails
and even forward the message to the IT department if escalated.

• An algorithm that is able to create tickets for all queries for unique tracking of job to
complete

• A system that allows the IT department to keep track of all helpdesk queries.

• An algorithm that prioritizes work to complete according to its urgency, time reported
and department reporting etc.

1.7 Ethics Consideration

This research is for learning objectives only, along with all the details in it. The system
honours the independence and self-respect of hotel and the targeted departments. Only
requests from the departments will be used for the progress of this research only and the
ICT department will be accountable for queries assigned by the individual users.

1.8 Conclusion
2

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Introduction
I performed some research on how earlier work done in the same context, just like
everyone else trying to navigate uncharted seas, and the results are merely a summary of
the extensive material that I found.

2.2 Related work

2.3 The highlights of other people's work that are connected to the current system will be
examined in this part. Below is some of the researches that I gathered:

• Automation of Online help desk information system has made it simpler for the general
public to ask questions or make suggestions. This kind of retrievals greatly varies
depending on various factors, such as immediate retrieval and the attention of officials
and users with one or more public sector entities. Automated help desk systems should
be able to quickly and easily find the information needed to help a user, whether they
are a novice who needs general information or an experienced user who needs more
detailed information. Given how quickly knowledge in various fields can change, it
should be simple to maintain. The primary goal was to create a user-friendly information
retrieval process for the helpdesk for each user. Utilizing this automated online help
desk system requires meeting all specifications of a specific organization. The prototype
created for use on the web combines case-based reasoning and keyword search to offer
both quick focus on a specific section of the help content and guided interaction when
the user is unsure of the best keywords. For future problems, the maintenance
distributed environment should be established.

• Comprehensive IT support teams in large organizations need more staff to handle employee
engagement and requests from various channels on a round-the-clock basis. It is suggested
that an Automated Email Technical Queries Help Desk have real-time, immediate responses
and email categorization. A scalable, universal solution with sure-fire static rules is
compared with various machine learning and deep learning approaches for email topic
modelling. The subject line, body, attachment, OCR text, and a few feature-engineered
custom features are provided as input elements for emails. For the actual corporate email
data set, the performance of the XG Boost cascaded hierarchical models and the Bi-LSTM
model with word embedding is good, with an overall accuracy of 77.3. The overall
automation system architecture achieves 85.6-percentage accuracy for real-world corporate
emails by introducing threshold techniques. Combining quick fixes, static rules, and machine
learning categorization as a low-cost inference solution reduces human effort in the
automation and real-time implementation processes by 81 percent.
• Electronic Helpdesk Support System is a digital platform used by organizations to effectively
and methodically handle user complaints. It gives customers assistance in a variety of ways
and enables businesses to maintain excellent customer service. Helpdesk services typically
require teams of human experts with various levels of knowledge and skills to resolve
customers' issues in any given domain. The lack of highly qualified specialists in many fields
of work necessitates the use of electronic helpdesks (e-Helpdesks) in organizations. Today,
users (students, faculty, and nonteaching staff) in many tertiary institutions in developing
nations (such as Nigeria) must submit their requests or complaints manually to helpdesk
officers in the appropriate units. Each user who requires assistance must submit a letter of
complaint or a fully filled-out complaint or requisition form in hardcopy, outlining their
issues or needs. The helpdesk officer then manually processes the letter or form. This
manual method of helpdesk management is laborious, boring, and ineffective. Additionally,
it is very prone to record loss, making record tracking or processing a large volume of
complaints very challenging. This paper suggests the e-Helpdesk system as a solution to
these problems. The Model-View-Controller design pattern was used to create the system
architecture, and ColdFusion and the MySQL relational database management system were
used to implement the prototype. With information gathered from Lagos State University in
Lagos, Nigeria, the prototype was tested. The results produced in terms of system
performance were observed, and it was discovered that they outperformed the manual
helpdesk system currently in place in terms of processing large volumes of data quickly,
accurately, and with user-friendliness.

• Intelligent Web-Based Help Desk System: By providing online access to a case-based help
desk, the project described in this paper expands the idea of help desk automation. It
 investigates the use of case-based reasoning and cognitive engineering models to
develop a help desk system that is "intelligent" and "learns." It provides an overview of
the technologies used to build a help desk for NASA data users and talks about the Auto
Help architecture for such a help desk.

• Help Desk Management System: An Automated Help Desk is what the study is trying to create
and build. It specifically aimed to address the following issues: 1. What assistance resources
are accessible to both clients and the help desk? 2. How is the information's performance of
the planned help desk measured? To verify the system's functioning and utility, it was
implemented in Metro Manila schools. Following their analysis of the data, the researchers
came to the following conclusions: 1. According to the respondents' evaluation of the client-
accessible help desks' support resources, customers can use a variety of online tools and
resources from the help desks to address their IT-related issues. Self-help resources can
significantly increase the help desk's hours of operation by enabling customers to get
answers to their queries even when the help desk is unstaffed. The availability of self-service
resources can lower the need for direct interaction with the help desk staff while
maintaining service availability and quality, even during the help desk's regular business
hours. 2. The evaluation of the respondents' responses in terms of the performance of the
proposed automated help desk demonstrates that staff members are knowledgeable about
information technologies to improve teaching and learning, research, and administration
with ongoing updates. The features and tools the help desk gave them as they used the
system are particularly appreciated by them. These resources are independent, functionally
connected, and integrated with help desk automation systems.
2.4 Conclusion

The traditional helpdesk systems were discussed in the paper I was researching. Although
using off-the-shelf equipment is a possibility, the majority of systems can be used in first
world nations if put in ideal setting. Indeed, by the use of AI based system we can acquire
best results.