2012 may seem quite daunting given the massive changes sweeping through the IT industry this year. You’ll have your own views on what’s important, but there are a number of universal challenges.
- The acceptance of cloud threatening the status quo of internal IT departments managing their own services
- The growing adoption of user-owned devices
- Ongoing budget worries
These are issues that have loomed large in 2011 and will continue to challenge us throughout this new year.
It seems logical that large scale, complex issues like these demand similarly ambitious thinking to solve. However, dig slightly deeper and you find that the future of ITSM is best defined by going back to basics.
Consider this research just released by SDI (Service Desk Institute) giving us insight to the working practices of IT support teams. According to the survey, 75 per cent of businesses have no idea how much it costs to field an IT support phone call. Understanding of email management is also lacking, with 84 per cent admitting they are unable to put a price tag on this routine task.
This is quite a staggering admission and helps explain why service desks are struggling to secure budget. If we don’t know the cost of what we do, how can we understand whether we are offering value for money? More pertinently, if we fail to understand our own costs, how can we expect accountants and business leaders to support and fund what we do?
Before service desks can begin to tackle the bigger issues, they need to focus on the basics first. If you can make these calculations, you can begin to assign a value to tasks such as user support (useful for safeguarding against the threat of being outsourced) and delivering software services (protecting against cloud). And once you have this data, you can ascertain the cost of supporting user-owned devices because it will be based on financially sound thinking.
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