Our 2011 State of the IT Service Desk Survey shows that today's technical support models are about to go the way of the dinosaur. End users aren't using our service desk portals; instead, they're going to blogs, vendor and user online support sites, and social and informal networks. Less than a quarter of the more than 1,200 respondents are expanding their staffs, while 28% are officially frozen at current levels. What customers want most is accurate resolution so they can get back to work, yet most service desks still measure themselves as if pure response time is the most important success factor. Hint: It's not.

Employee behavior is driven by what is measured, and as long as service desks continue to prioritize response time over resolution, there will be a disconnect between the customer's view of the support group and that organization's view of itself. More on this later.

What these groups aren't doing is making the case that the service desk contributes to achieving business goals, and the service organization's costs aren't being viewed in relation to overall business costs. Now, that's not to say call volumes are going down. In April, InformationWeek Analytics and HDI, an IT service and support association, surveyed 1,214 business technology and service management professionals to determine the state of the IT service desk. Most, 61%, say their incident volumes are up. Just 11% cite a decrease. The primary driver of call-volume increases is change: new hardware, mobile devices, applications, infrastructure architectures, and customers. Security is also top of mind.

Our advice: Embrace service management frameworks, standards, policies, and best practices. Only then can you align your offerings with customer needs.

Doing Something Right

In our poll, 11% report a decrease in the number of support incidents; most say a more stable infrastructure is the primary reason. It's likely these service groups have improved their change management processes. Self-service tools and practices could also be a major contributor, but just because you've added self-service capabilities, don't assume a direct correlation between a decrease in support incidents reported to the service desk and an increase in customer satisfaction, quality, and availability of IT services--on the contrary, a decline in support incidents may just mean that the service desk lacks visibility into these support incidents or is unable to report on them. And that's a problem.

Incident-volume trends aside, respondents say their top three financial priorities are cutting costs (24%), enhancing efficiency (20%), and enhancing effectiveness (17%). Yet 58% don't know what their costs are, according to this study and related HDI research. That means they can't conduct cost-benefit analyses or even determine ROI, making it difficult to justify new support investments. But there are two ways to make the case: security and mobility.

Fully 78% of respondents cite security-related issues as their key concern. Yet only 27% have formal security management processes, a bewilderingly low rate considering that 54% report using security tools, and 21% plan to update or replace these tools.

How can service desks acquire new security systems in the absence of a security policy?

The business owns the data, so the business must define access, classification, and retention policies. Meanwhile, IT needs to work closely with the business to implement these policies. Security policies are especially important around mobility: More than half of respondents' companies provide at least partial support for iPhones (52%) and iPads (51%), 34% support Android devices, and about 30% support Windows Mobile. These numbers are likely to continue to increase. BlackBerrys are still the most common company-owned mobile devices supported, with 60% of respondents reporting full support in their companies and an additional 20% reporting partial support.

One of the challenges associated with mobility is that many companies are adopting policies that let employees use personal devices to access company resources. For many years, we've watched service desks struggle to provide best-effort support for new devices, from PCs and PDAs to remote access and tablets.

The challenge with supporting user-owned devices is that there's no good definition of what IT's on the hook for. "Partial" mobile device support often results in full support--but without the training, documentation, and escalation plans that would be in place if mobile devices were a formal part of the company's support services. As a result, partial support typically incurs much higher costs than if the IT organization either fully supported the devices or didn't support them at all.