If an international friend or colleague were to tell you that, “It’s too hot here” – how hot do you think it is (where they are)? Of course, it depends. And on many different factors. For example, it depends on where they live – with a Finnish friend likely to have a different definition of what hot is to a friend from Brazil. Or whether that friend is at home or traveling abroad. Or even their personal preference for hot and cold environments. The same is true for how well your IT service desk is performing and how you can truly understand its level of performance.

For example, is your IT service desk having a per-analyst average of six tickets handled per hour a good, bad, or indifferent level of performance? The answer is again, “It depends.” And as with my opening analogy, it will depend on many factors. Importantly, it’s hard and potentially dangerous to measure your IT service desk’s performance in a vacuum – and it’s where the power of industry benchmarks will help.

It’s hard and potentially dangerous to measure your IT service desk’s performance in a vacuum – and it’s where the power of industry benchmarks will help, says @OdedMoshe. #servicedesk Click To Tweet

Don’t overlook the opportunity to benchmark internally using trends

Before jumping into the opportunities of industry benchmarking, it’s important not to miss the opportunity that’s closer to home – that of benchmarking your organization against itself. This could be as simple as looking at IT service desk performance trends to understand where improvements are being made over time. Or, depending on your organization’s size and structure, perhaps even benchmarking across different IT service desks (and potentially non-IT service desks if considered appropriate).

Be careful not to become complacent though – because a significant improvement of performance over time, while great, still might leave your IT service desk in a position of below-average performance. And to sit back, having achieved that significant improvement, is not something that’s in the best interest of your organization.

Benefitting from industry benchmarks

While benchmarking internally is great – in that it allows you to identify and report on ongoing improvements – the ability to compare your IT service desk performance with that of other IT service desks offers an independent indication and validation of performance.

Using industry benchmarks, such as those found in SysAid’s Benchmark Tool, provides an extra dimension of comparison. For instance, referring back to the original example metric of six tickets handled per hour, finding out that this performance is lower than the industry average of eight tickets, say.

Ideally though, your IT service desk shouldn’t be comparing itself to a generic average benchmark. Instead, it should be looking to benchmarks that are based on the performance of similar organizations (to your company). The next section explains why.

Be careful to compare IT support apples with apples

It’s important to ensure that you understand how benchmark metrics are calculated. For example, if your IT service desk includes meeting room bookings in its incident management statistics, then it’ll probably always exceed industry benchmarks for metrics such as the average number of tickets handled per analyst per hour (due to the speed of meeting bookings versus the resolution of real incidents).

Here @OdedMoshe discusses how comparing your IT #servicedesk performance with that of other IT service desks offers an independent indication and validation of performance. Click To Tweet

Another good example is the cost per ticket. What do you include in your cost-per-ticket calculation versus the benchmark figure that you’re comparing your IT service desk against? For instance, is there:

• An appropriate ITSM tool cost added in – from what the tool itself costs to the monthly management and administration costs?
• A facilities cost included? Or other line-of-business costs such as an apportionment of human resources (HR) costs?
• An all-in employee cost that includes additional costs such as pension contributions?
• Line management costs, including a proportion of the senior management costs up to the CIO?

I could go on but the main point here is to again ensure that you’re fairly comparing like with like when assessing your IT service desk’s performance.

Benchmarking in the age of enterprise service management

So, it’s great to be able to compare your IT service desk’s performance to that of similar organizations. Whether this is to demonstrate how well it’s being operated or to justify an investment in service and support improvements. But given the growing adoption and execution of enterprise service management strategies – where other business functions can benefit from ITSM best practices and capabilities (maybe labeled as “back-office digital transformation”) – there’s also the opportunity to benchmark service and support performance for other lines of business such as HR and facilities. It’s something that we’re actively working on given the growing use of SysAid in non-IT use case scenarios.

Hopefully, this blog has helped to convey the power of industry benchmarking. The SysAid Benchmark Tool will further help our customers to improve performance. If you have any questions or opinions, about this blog or benchmarking in general, then please let me know in the comments.