h2index newsletter - April 2012

Greetings!

• End user services benchmarking survey 2011 
• Outsourcing - the minimum retained organisation 
• How not to create a legacy - part 3 
• Participants wanted 

For the last six years, h2index has regularly benchmarked end user services (EUS). The participants are major corporations in pharmaceuticals, financial services, chemicals and consumer goods, each employing tens of thousands of staff in around 100 countries. The results contained a plentiful mix of ideas with lots of intriguing detail, far too long to cover here, but three key findings illustrate the insight provided.     

Annual service desk cost per user

All the companies are all mature, well run organizations using well-established service providers, tools and processes. Despite this, there is still a remarkable difference in costs. For service desks, the most expensive cost/user was three times that of the lowest. For desk-side support, one company's cost/interaction was double that of most other participants. There are real opportunities for companies to improve their performance to the level of the best.

Quality of service was also benchmarked, and the most surprising result was a significant and unexpected increase in the service desk time-to-answer. When asked about the reasons for this increase afterwards, participants suggested that people had become accustomed to using help desks, both at home and at work, and were less concerned about longer waiting times.

Time to answer 2009 & 2011

First Contact Resolution

The key criterion of First Contact Resolution also held surprises because companies increasingly provide data for "eligible tickets" rather than all tickets. This appears to be driven by service providers who only want to be measured by issues under their control. In three cases the participants gave both measures and there was a substantial gap. Do IT managers realize that their measures do not reflect user experience?

In previous benchmarking studies the structure of the EUS function usually mirrored the set up of business units, geographical and functional. Times have changed and it is clear that two primary drivers are now language and a single logical operation for the globe. Some participants provided the most sophisticated model with a single logical service (one management team, one set of tools) running multiple centres.

Simon Bennett, partner at h2index: "One of the limitations of our newsletter is that you can't present the richness and insight of these extensive surveys. If you'd like to know more, please contact us by replying to this email. "    

Are high levels of customization of PC environments really necessary? This is the third part in a series about the difficulties IT managers face as they attempt to build something today that isn't a legacy tomorrow:

• Short term expediency v long term flexibility 
• Evergreening v customisation 
• Standard v highly engineered PCs

Many companies continue to devote substantial resources to engineering a custom built PC environment. This quickly becomes a constraint: it is often incompatible with new and upgraded software removing an organization's agility - its ability to react swiftly to new opportunities to improve productivity.  

It's not just about PCs, h2index knows one organization that customized its Apple environment to the extent that when staff take their machine to Apple stores to get support they are told that the device is broken. Maybe the customization has gone too far.

Given companies' reasonable concerns about security and the obvious benefits of ease of use and ease of access, the pressure to re-engineer the desktop is understandable. But every company does it very differently - why is this? In contrast, h2index also sees a few corporations that give their employees virtually standard PCs. Which makes one wonder, what do organizations really have to do?  

Now they have the chance to find out. Consumerisation or "bring your own computer" gives companies an opportunity to evaluate the minimum requirement and lower the level of customization, in fact it is forcing them to re-evaluate.  

Participants wanted

h2index is continually undertaking research for its clients and each project requires a panel of representative organisations.  

Network and telecommunications benchmarking

h2index has been asked to run a new benchmarking survey of network and telecommunications services (NTS) using the same methodology as its highly successful end user services benchmark, which has been running for the last six years.

IT managers remain under severe financial pressure and NTS represents a significant proportion of overall IT costs. At the same time, new challenges such as moving into emerging markets and increasing user mobility are changing network demand radically. In addition, technology is developing quickly and new providers constantly appear, such as Microsoft and its Lync product.

The research focuses upon how companies are adapting, or planning to adapt their NTS policies and structure to address these challenges. Each participant receives a full report and presentation detailing the findings including an interpretation of the results in the context of their company and recommended courses of action.

Participants are large multinational corporations with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees in many countries, complex business structures and high expectations of their communications services. These companies are constantly innovating both their business and their IT services.

If you are interested in taking part, please reply to this email.