In a previous blog post, SysAid – a provider of IT management solutions – was kind enough to share some metrics/performance snapshots collected from its customers. As a quick recap, SysAid captures service desk benchmarking information through its customers’ use of its software (on an opt-in basis of course) for the benefit of all.

At some point we should sit down and compare the SysAid stats to those provided by HDI – a great independent source of service desk benchmarks – that’s a challenge to you Roy Atkinson … BTW, I hope the HDI 2013 event is going well in Las Vegas this week (the Twitter hash tag is #hdiconf13 for people, like me, who aren’t there). Anyway, back to those SysAid stats …

A selection of community-based service desk stats …

There are two points to note here: not all SysAid customers participate (according to its website, SysAid now has over 100,000 customer organizations); and I have cherry-picked a handful of the available stats from March 2013. There is also one caveat from me – there is no differentiation of organization size in these stats, we need to drill down further to account for any small or very large organization bias.

Percentage of incident tickets originating from the End User Portal, Average 60.31%

The average response rate for Quick Surveys (upon closing tickets) is 8.67%

  • This is indicative in my experience.

On average, customers have a total variation of 205 categories defined in three levels

BUT, on average, only 34 categories were actually in use for the past 30 days

  • This is very interesting, and IMO indicative of what many organizations suffer from – issues in creating incident classification hierarchies, incident classifications created on the fly, or both.

A final stat that isn’t in pictures is that, for the participating organizations, there are an average of 61 end-users per admin (i.e. per service desk agent). OK, one more then … 2%-28% of  tickets relate to passwords – the average is 6%. The benefits of using automated password reset I assume.

Final thoughts

I have yet to see any other mainstream IT service management (ITSM) tool provider collect and share customer information in a community-driven way and believe me I have mentioned what SysAid does to nearly every tool vendor I have spoken with in the last 18 months. It seems such a great thing to do for your customers.

If you are at the Service Desk and IT Support Show (SITS13) in London next week you could always drop in to SysAider Oded Moshe’s presentation on Benchmarking and BI. And to provide some balance to this blog, you might also want to look out for the following ITSM tool vendors I’ve blogged about recently:  Axios SystemsBMC SoftwareCherwell SoftwareFrontRange, Hornbill SystemsLANDeskManageEngineOMNINET, Serena Software, ServiceNowSunriseTOPdesk, and Vivantio.

Finally, I’m there too if you want to hear someone talk about ITSM far too much. Or if I’m busy, Barclay Rae can produce as much hot air as I do – in fact we will be like two overly-stoked chimneys during a breakfast briefing with Axios on the Wednesday. I hope to see you there.

As always, your thoughts and comments are appreciated.

Related metrics blog: “We Do A Great Job In IT, Our Metrics Dashboard Is A Sea Of Green.” Really?