IT is a key budgetary area for most organisations. So when business costs rise, scrutiny around spending increases. Whether operating an in-house IT team or working with an outsourced IT partner, organisations want to know they’re receiving value. In our blog below, we outline ways that organisations can benchmark IT service performance to assess if they’re getting value:
1. Examine the ROI
Perhaps the most critical way to benchmark IT services is to look at their value to your organisation, and the potential multiplier effect for overall business performance. A proactive support service, for example, reduces IT issues and business downtime, helping staff to be more productive and profitable. In contrast, expensive in-house servers that take time and high costs to maintain don’t represent a good ROI (compared to a cloud solution). Comparing business IT investment in all areas determines the best return on investment.
2. Benchmark your IT support model
A high-end service can be expensive, but a cheap service tends not to perform at peak times or in crisis moments. Achieving a quality balance offers the ‘right size’ of support service and performance against cost, thereby delivering value.
3. Review service tickets
As part of benchmarking an IT service, it’s helpful to assess how many support tickets the IT service desk handles. Benchmark ticket resolution times against stats provided by outsourced providers to determine if your internal team or contracted partner’s performance is comparable. A review of support tickets and the time taken can also determine if there are obvious knowledge gaps within your internal teams or outsourced provider.
4. Technology vs Productivity
Businesses lose time when IT services fail. If you can benchmark productive hours across the business, linked to IT provision, then this is a valuable tracker over time. Assess whether your external partner or internal teams are driving the right investments in IT systems and applications that drive better performance and less downtime.
5. Customer service
Benchmarking your IT service performance against ‘customer’ (ie. internal) satisfaction. This is a good performance rating to track over time and to manage within set parameters of acceptability. It provides a ready acid test of whether the function is working as it should. If staff have a low view of the performance of internal IT teams, it could be time to see if an outsourced solution can perform better.
Benchmarking IT services: Where Next?
By benchmarking IT service performance, organisations can quantify performance, monitor changes over time, facilitate decision-making and support business cases for investment.
If your benchmarking leads you to determine your internal team or existing partner isn’t performing as well as possible, it’s time to investigate IT outsourcing – or taking your services to market if you already work with an outsourced partner.
Akita is a leading IT outsourcing partner. We support organisations across London and the South East alongside their locations across the UK and internationally. For more infomation about our IT support:
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