The Top 5 IT Metrics Your Organization Must Track
The ITIL IT service management (ITSM) body of service management best practices is now 36 years old. However, despite this longevity, there are still areas where IT organizations continue to seek help. One of these is which IT metrics to focus on, particularly for the IT service desk and corporate IT support capabilities. This includes both what to measure and how to measure performance.
Metrics are so important to ITSM, offering insights into performance and improvement to all levels of IT personnel. However, their value very much depends on what’s measured and its alignment with what matters most to the organization and its key stakeholders.
So, what sets successful companies apart when leveraging ITSM services in their growth strategy? Here are the 5 key pillars to focus on—some of which might surprise you!
The value of IT metrics very much depends on what’s measured & its alignment with what matters most to the organization & its key stakeholders. Here @Joe_the_IT_Guy explores. Share on XHelp is at hand
My colleagues at SysAid have an answer to this question based on years of working with customers to improve their IT service and support capabilities. This blog post shares this insight in the form of five of the best IT metrics your IT service desk can employ. Please keep reading to learn what they are and how they help. Plus, how artificial intelligence (AI)-based capabilities now help your IT service desk employees and leaders to get instant insight into performance and improvement opportunities.
You can also watch this SysAid on-demand webinar: Top 5 IT Metrics You Must Track: A Practical Guide to Collecting, Analyzing, and Reporting with SysAid Analytics
Our recommended top 5 metrics for IT service desks
Before I dive into the details, here’s a quick list of what our recommended top five IT metrics are:
- Mean time to repair (MTTR)
- User satisfaction
- SLAs (service level agreements)
- Efficiency
- “AI contained.”
The following five sections explain more.
Mean time to repair (or resolution)
MTTR measures the average time taken to resolve an incident from the time it’s reported until it’s fully resolved. The metric provides insight into the efficiency of the incident management process and IT service desk operations.
Using an MTTR Dashboard (within your ITSM tool), your IT service desk can view different MTTR perspectives to help improve performance, such as:
- Average MTTR over time
- Average MTTR by incident category
- Average MTTR incidents versus requests
- Average MTTR by resolution group.
Tracking MTTR helps your IT service desk understand its performance relative to business expectations (which might be documented in SLA targets). Using MTTR, your IT service desk can identify bottlenecks or areas for improvement in IT support processes – meaning that your team can streamline IT service desk operations and improve workflows.
MTTR can also be used as a benchmark against industry averages. Making it a factor that helps drive operational excellence. There’s also an impact on end-user or customer satisfaction because quicker resolution times usually lead to higher customer satisfaction.
Generative AI (GenAI) can be used to access MTTR insight quickly. Using natural language, a Copilot can be asked to provide details such as the MTTR for last week, breaking it down by incident priority and comparing it to the week before. It’s a great and simple GenAI use case that will help to build employee trust in your GenAI capabilities.
User satisfaction
User satisfaction defines how well your IT service desk meets the needs and expectations of its end-users. It can be measured by collecting feedback on the service experience and resolution quality after closing an IT support ticket.
It reflects issue resolution effectiveness from the end-user’s perspective and assesses the overall service quality. High user satisfaction scores indicate that your IT service desk provides timely assistance and meets end-user needs.
Used correctly, end-user feedback will highlight their pain points, operational inefficiencies, and areas for improvement in IT support capabilities. Employees don’t want to be inconvenienced by IT issues, and fast, effective IT support means they can return to work quickly, minimizing their productivity losses. High user satisfaction levels also reflect positively on your IT service desk, increasing your staff’s motivation.
SysAid’s AI Insight Report provides your IT support staff with up-to-date information on their performance. For example, it highlights their average MTTR, the percentage of incidents closed within 24 hours, their average user satisfaction score, and the percentage of surveys answered. It also provides good and bad performance statistics (with recommendations on improvement) and predictions for the next seven days.
SLAs
SLAs are formal agreements that document the service relationship between a service provider, such as your IT service desk, and its customers. They include the expected service levels, specify measurable metrics, and define both parties’ responsibilities. A good example is resolution time, which, as with previous metrics, can be viewed from various perspectives, such as by resolution group.
SLAs set clear expectations regarding how and when your IT service desk will respond to and resolve incidents or requests. They also motivate IT service desk teams to prioritize tasks effectively and include escalation processes.
Regularly monitoring and reporting SLA compliance highlights performance trends and areas for improvement. This helps your IT service desk to optimize its processes and allocate resources effectively. For example, the SysAid AI Insight Report might show the percentage of incidents closed within 24 hours for this week versus last week, along with recommendations for improvement.
Efficiency
Efficiency metrics measure how effectively your IT service desk uses its resources to deliver IT services. They focus on productivity, resource utilization, and operational performance to help your IT service desk deliver high service quality while optimizing costs.
There are many possible measures of an IT service desk’s efficiency. However, a key one is the number of handoffs. This is where a ticket is passed to multiple people before it’s resolved. Importantly, increased handoffs not only increase the average ticket handling costs but also likely lead to delays, increased resolution times, and poorer end-user experiences. Tracking handoffs highlights areas where routing is incorrect, additional training is needed, or intra-team coordination and collaboration can be improved.
The level of handoffs can be found in the SysAid AI Insight Report in the “Percent of tickets resolved without other admins (no handoffs)” metric. Again, this figure can be compared to previous weeks and industry benchmarks to highlight issues and individual and team improvement opportunities.
AI contained
The AI-contained metric measures AI adoption success. It reports the level of service records resolved without human involvement to indicate how well your organization and people leverage the AI capabilities within the corporate ITSM tool.
A similar metric is “AI touched,” which reports the percentage of tickets impacted by one or more AI interactions. For example, using an AI chatbot via the IT self-service portal or Microsoft Teams, or AI intelligent categorization.
AI is increasingly improving corporate IT support capabilities, and, as with any ITSM capability, using the right metrics will help your IT service desk fully reap the available benefits. For example, you can create reports from a simple conversation, with the SysAid Copilot generating the desired report(s) based on you asking questions in natural language.
To learn more on each of these IT metrics, please watch this SysAid on-demand webinar: Top 5 IT Metrics You Must Track: A Practical Guide to Collecting, Analyzing, and Reporting with SysAid Analytics
