International Survey by ICCM Solutions shows IT Professionals do not Recognise the Service Desk as a Profit Centre
IT professionals are failing to recognise the opportunity for service desks to be profitable, according to an international survey conducted by ICCM Solutions across Europe and North America.
Only 25 per cent of respondents questioned at Europe’s largest Service Management exhibition, Service Desk and IT Support Show 2011 , said they believed the service desk has the ability to generate revenue opportunities and become a profit centre. Whist in direct comparison with North America, when asked the same question, 43 per cent of respondents at the HDI Conference and EXPO 2011 in Las Vegas answered that it does.
James Gay, CEO at ICCM Solutions, comments, “It is disappointing to see that the service desk is not being recognised as a potential revenue-generating unit within a European context. Especially as ITIL was born out of what was essentially a European framework. The IT industry is a highly skilled arena, but to demonstrate its value as more than just a cost-centre, IT professionals must find their entrepreneurial spirit and exploit the potential of service management strategies to open new revenue streams and instigate progress service management programmes that utilise current displacement technologies.
“This is particularly important in the UK and Europe if, as the survey and our own experience indicates, the IT industry in other regions such as North America is already realising the importance of moving Service Management into the revenue generating spectrum.”
US-based Miller-Valentine Group is a prime example of how organisations are demonstrating a return on investment through foresight in its application of its service desk.
James Gay explains, “ICCM Solutions has been working with Miller-Valentine to provide an advanced IT Service Management Solution based on Business Process Management Architecture. The company is a clear IT visionary and represents an emerging trend of moving beyond the status quo of traditional IT Service Management Solutions by linking business processes to Service Desk delivery for IT asset management.”
Michael Gutman, Vice President of Information Technology & Information Services, says, “As an IT leader it has been historically very difficult for me to give the business an accurate view of IT spend and relating this to the running of the IT infrastructure. In order for us to do this we’ve had to radically change our service offering to the business by moving from a traditional IT funding model, of head count budget allocation, to a paid for service delivery model from each of the business units we support.
“Our IT department is now funded by the services we offer rather than a budget we’re allocated annually. This forces hidden IT support costs within the business unit to become visible to the whole organisation. The subscription-based charge back system allows business unit leaders to identify cost-saving opportunities and to provide cost justification on any new IT outlay.”
————————————————————————————————
1) The Service Desk and IT Support Show was held on 19 – 20 April 2011 at Earls Court
2) The HDI Conference and Expo was held on 27 – 30 March 2011 at The Palazzo at The Venetian, Las Vegas
Posted in BPM, BPM, Current Blogs, Events, General, ITIL, ITSM, Press Release, Service Catalogue, White Papers | No Comments »
Measuring ROI Needs to Come Out of the Silo:
The identification of ROI programs within ITSM projects is proving difficult for IT Service Management professionals to quantify; according to a new research report published by www.sm-roi.com – the International body representing ITSM peers in the pursuit of identifying and promoting ROI best practice in ITSM.
“An IT Service Management ROI Findings Summary – Research Paper”
Findings:
SM-ROI.com has identified four major obstacles as to why IT professionals are failing to accurately represent ROI in ITSM projects. Access to the report and its findings can be downloaded here:
“An IT Service Management ROI Findings Summary – Research Paper”
- IT people do not understand how to present financial information to the business
- IT people ‘expect’ others to read & interpret what they represent – rather than present it in a consumable format
- IT fail to ask for help outside of their immediate sphere of responsibility
- IT people typically justify recommendations versus substantiate business objectives
Consolidation of International Primary Research
This paper is the consolidation of international primary research with in-depth surveys completed by over one hundred ITSM professionals giving insight into why the industry is failing their businesses by not identifying and implementing ROI Strategies.
Practitioner ROI Experiences
ITSM peers wishing to have full access to the supporting practitioner ROI experiences can do so by becoming a member of www.sm-roi.com
About SM-ROI.com
SM-ROI’s intention is to create visibility of the benefits of implementing a Progressive Service Management strategy for ROI purposes. Its aim is to help peers achieve ROI savings.
SM-ROI is a free portal and resource contributed to by its members; vendor neutral and is the leading international authority in the area of ROI for Service Management.
Join today by visiting www.sm-roi.com or download the strategy report.
Posted in BPM, BPM, Current Blogs, General, ITIL, ITSM, Microsoft, Press Release, Progressive Service Management, SaaS, Service Catalogue, White Papers, itSMF USA | 2 Comments »
The Guardian.co.uk
How British Transport Police has made significant efficiency savings through the exploiting the potential of its service desk technology. Before British Transport Police (BTP) implemented its service desk system the organisation had no clear way of viewing staff performance.
It had a legacy system which chief technology officer Cliff Cunningham describes as a “very basic Access database”, which struggled to deal with the information on 5,000 employees and more than 2,000 service desk calls each month. It was impossible to assess how much time staff were spending on specific incidents, or drill down to details to discover why some employees were taking longer than others in their responses.
Cliff Cunningham, the organisation’s chief technology officer, says this has changed since the implementation of a service desk system with business process management technology in 2006.
The decision to move to a newer system was part of a major refresh at the body. BTP gets its capital from the Department for Transport, and was given “a sum of money” to carry out a refresh of all of its desktops and servers.
“It gave us a fresh impetus as an organisation and obviously getting that new kit and having that sum of money meant that the estate grew, so there is a bigger requirement to manage it more effectively,” he says.
“In terms of the (IT) department, obviously it has enabled us to improve our efficiency and service,” he says. “And also, the way we have tailored the system, I can now tell how much time people are spending on incidents.”
He says this has been particularly important: “If two people are dealing with the same sort of incident why is one taking a lot longer than the other? It gives you the information you need to delve a bit deeper and understand whether there are training issues, whether the incident is not being recorded properly, or if the person spending too much time on other bits.”
As well as using the system, which was provided by ICCM Solutions, to examine staff performance, BTP has used it to improve communications between its 145 sites. Being able to change the workflow of the new system to suit the specific requirements at the organisation has helped this process, explains Cunningham.
It has also been used to identify the potential for savings by reducing the travelling time between locations and through the virtualisation of desktops and the IT facilities of remote offices.
“It’s trying to do more with less and that’s one of the reasons we’ve gone down the virtualisation route,” he says. “We can’t afford to keep our physical servers. I will not buy a physical server unless it can be justified. Everything we do, we’re looking at how to make it more cost-effective.”
Cunningham says that although it is difficult to quantify exactly how much has been saved, he has no doubt that it has made the force more effective and efficient, and that this is particularly important in the current financial climate for the public sector.
BTP has also used the technology to automate a large chunk of its services including requests for CCTV footage, for which a frontline police officer was previously needed to make the request, own it and then present information as part of a criminal case. This is now done through an automated BPM tracking process owned by an administrative staff member.
The organisation is also working on a project to develop electronic timesheets, as part of a plan to spread the BPM platform to as many different parts of the organisation as possible. “There are a number of manual processes we have that are very paper bound and are inefficient,” Cunningham says. “Whereas if I could automate them and build in all the auditing functions, and the checking, and the authorities, then obviously it is a big gain for us in terms of productivity.”
He admits that despite the success of the tool, it has taken staff at the organisation a bit of time to adapt, but insists that it was worth the effort.
“It’s a slow process, but once you get to a number of successes it sort of picks up its own momentum,” he says. “The trick is to get them to understand what they want, then we can look at what the best solution is.”
The Guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk/government-computing
Posted in BPM, BPM, Current Blogs, General, ITIL, ITSM, Press Release, Service Catalogue, White Papers | No Comments »