A “bonus” blog today (and hence it is quickly constructed) and the subject area will need to be returned to at a later date. The reason for the bonus blog is that I am a little bit excited.

SysAid, a provider of IT help desk and customer service software solutions, has provided me with a subset of the service desk benchmarking information captured through its customers’ use of its software (on an opt-in basis, of course).

To me, this is the sort of stuff that the ITSM community (see my previous blog) is crying out for – information that helps them to understand where they are and what they should aspire to. More information about the SysAid benchmarking is available at http://www.ilient.com/it-performance-benchmark.htm (link is provided for more detail on the definitions for the benchmarks below).

Average Service Requests (SR) closed per Admin (Service Desk Agent)

Important note: If you follow the above link, the assumptions show that the SRs are “incidents.”

Quick comment – I am assuming that this is per day but I am seeking clarification. As with all the slides in this blog, please treat with care in the absence of sample sizes.

Percent of Surveys Answers vs. Sent 

Quick comment – this shows what most of us already know – that getting internal customers (end users) to provide feedback on our services is difficult. It is interesting though to see the little “mound” at the far right of the graph. I wonder why this is.

End User vs. Admins Ratio

Quick comment – this figure seems low and is probably due to a smaller-customer-base bias. I will follow up with SysAid.

Average Resolution Time of SRs

Quick comment – it an interesting “aggregated” statistic, however it would be interesting to see this by severity/priority level (albeit having to acknowledge severity level criteria will be different between organizations).

So this is just a subset of what SysAid provides back to its customers in terms of benchmarking, I hope it has got you thinking. Sadly, I don’t have time to really comment on these stats today, BUT I would appreciate your comments and opinions on their value and where SysAid’s customer base and the ITSM community in general are at.

Please check out my latest blog ... http://blogs.forrester.com/stephen_mann