Most IT departments can tell you how much they spend on support, but few can quantify the economic impact of support. The result is that many technical service and support organizations are on the defensive when it comes to budgeting and spending, and often struggle to get the funding needed to deliver even adequate levels of support. In recent years, a handful of pioneering organizations have adopted a different strategy when it comes to support—a strategy that emphasizes value over cost—and they routinely deliver benefits far in excess of their costs.

Newer support organizations tend to be chaotic and reactive, while more mature organizations are calm, focused, and disciplined. Those in the latter category operate very strategically, and exhibit a number of Zen-like qualities that enable them to achieve extraordinary success.  This article explores the Zen-like nature of the industry’s most successful support organizations, and presents a unifying framework for achieving excellence in user support.

Many believe that the cost of desktop support consists entirely of the personnel, technology, and facilities that comprise the function. From a pure accounting perspective, this may be true. However, there are many less-obvious costs that factor into the true cost of desktop support.  In this article, MetricNet uses benchmarking data to demonstrate that the cost of desktop support is often much higher than expected.

Benchmarking is a well-established tool for measuring and managing service desk performance. Effective benchmarking enables you to quantify the performance of your service desk and define the actions necessary to close any gaps.  The power of benchmarking is that it enables a service desk to save enormous amounts of time and energy by building upon the best practices of the industry’s top performers.