Management Information for Accurate Business Decision Support

These days service desks can capture huge amounts of performance data: call handling time, first contact resolution, staff utilization, etc. But to make informed decisions, service desk managers should not consider these data points in isolation. They need to look beyond simple measurement and reporting to understand the role that Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) play in a service desk.

Most service desk operations work toward a set of critical success factors set by the business, such as improving customer satisfaction. But how do you know whether IT is staying on track? To maintain and improve the service desk it’s important to monitor progress toward these goals, which is the role of KPIs. By capturing those KPIs critical to success and then having a means to track and trend service desk performance against them over time allows the service desk to identify and diagnose problems effectively and establish performance objectives that align to the business.

Track and Trend against KPIs

LANDesk® Management Information enables organizations to accurately track and measure the complete service desk environment against their own KPIs or a set of pre-defined indicators so that managers can maintain visibility of how their own business areas are performing against measurement criteria agreed upon in business plans and defined within KPIs. If a service desk wishes to go one step further and benchmark against peers, it’s possible to import additional KPIs or other service metrics.

Having such key information available on a regular basis enables you to determine the source of problems and what corrective measures should be taken, which provides a launch pad for service improvement.

Gain a Holistic View

When making decisions that impact the business, it’s important that service desk data not be viewed in isolation as there are many external factors that can influence performance. LANDesk Management Information can reach out to multiple external data sources such as data from telephone automatic call distributor systems (ACDs) as well as information from availability, capacity or web monitoring tools and perform calculations. The resulting values are captured and stored in a warehouse for use in trend analysis.

LANDesk Management Information enables the service desk to view, compare and trend data from new perspectives. You can view the bigger picture because the solution helps uncover the “why” as well as the “what.”

Communicate to the Business

The resultant metrics are displayed as trend graphs with service indicators easily identifiable as green lines and red lines for acceptable or below performance thresholds, respectively. It’s possible to see at a glance how effectively IT is supporting the business, as well as spot irregularities across a specific date range—weekly, monthly, yearly, etc.

From a mountain of service management performance and other siloed data, managers and end users now have access to business intelligence that they wouldn’t be able to see otherwise. For example, the correlation between customer satisfaction and IT data about malware attacks or operating system updates over time is not a trend that can be deduced quickly from service desk data alone.

With LANDesk Management Information, gathering data and disseminating information has never been easier. These performance metrics enable the service desk to communicate in a way that business stakeholders understand. Metrics can be exported and shared or displayed as gadgets on the Service Desk or Self Service Dashboard according to group or role profiles, providing an easy-to-understand view for non-technical users.

Drive Service Improvements

LANDesk Management Information enables the use of critical metrics as a diagnosis tool to improve performance as well as benchmark performance against industry peers. Enabling managers to diagnose and understand the underlying drivers of performance gaps reduces the time to action and directs effort where it’s most needed to improve performance and achieve objectives.  

Key Features

KPI Definition 

• Create organization-specific KPIs
• Define service metrics
• Import KPIs

Management Information Engine 

• Define queries for reporting on any aspect of an organizational system
• Schedule data collection
• Warehouse the results of data calculations

Dashboard Gadget 

• Up to 12 service metrics can be displayed on one trend graph
• Assign each service the threshold target values that define acceptable performance levels of a KPI, visible via green lines and red lines
• Available to view on all service desk interfaces, including mobile devices

RSS Feeds 

• Set RSS feeds from Service Desk