How good is the service that your Help Desk provides?

If the answer that immediately springs to your mind is “not very good” then don’t worry, that’s the typical response and, I think, the typical service. An interesting stat surfaced in a conversation I had with the CEO of an Infrastructure Management consultancy. Here it is:

Between 70% and 100% of the time, users do not report service problems to the Help Desk. (The stat comes from someone who is doing research in the area).

The range 70% to 100% seems wide, but it masks the difference between different organizations and different groups of users. If the Help Desk is relatively responsive then the figure will be closer to 70%. If not, it will be worse. The 100% figure applies to some groups of users using the Internet to access a company’s applications (potential customers for example). They almost never report faults or poor service.

Why should they? Staff are more likely to call problems in.

So have you, like me, been reading the various marketing chats about IT and SLAs (particularly from Infrastructure Management vendors)?

Mostly this is just noise. Right now IT does not have the technology deployed to deliver genuinely meaningful service levels. And right now, most IT users suffer from Help Desk fatigue.

SOA could change this by the way,  but it will only do so if the implementation of it includes the service level measurement of business processes.