Over the past few years, IT service management (ITSM) has become increasingly important to an organization's IT strategy, and companies are seeking new ways to improve IT service delivery and efficiency via better ITSM processes. This increases the importance of tracking and measuring critical KPIs.

However, due to overwhelmingly large amounts of data, users find it challenging to manually access, track and analyze critical help desk information quickly. Using advanced IT analytics, managers can identify blind spots and hidden gaps in their ITSM process as well as make accurate decisions by monitoring key metrics.

Here is how advanced IT analytics can make the best of your IT service desk.

1. Minimize the impact of business downtime

Anticipate service outages by monitoring metrics like frequency of downtime and mean time to repair (MTTR). Using these metrics, build intuitive reports to identify crucial failure points and to understand the impact of an infrastructure change (such as server migration or a software upgrade). Communicate effectively by sharing these reports with your team, and formulate an action plan to handle emergency situations.

2. Optimize resource management

Using real-time dashboards, monitor periods of peak business activity and manage technician workload by measuring critical metrics, including the number of incoming requests, ticket turnaround time and technician performance. Develop an optimal staffing model to suit the increasing volume of customer demands and improve service desk efficiency.

3. Improve service quality

Although ticket resolution rate and technician performance based on closure rate are good parameters to judge the overall performance of your service desk, they aren't always enough. Sometimes, in order to show high closure rates and to prove their capability, technicians will close tickets without properly resolving them, ultimately compromising service quality. To combat this, managers can use analytical tools to derive a correlation between ticket resolution and re-opening rates to accurately determine work efficiency.

4. Maximize ROI on software purchases

A software asset management report can track software licenses (identifying over-licensed or under-licensed software), predict service request trends and measure software utilization rates to calculate unnecessary software expenditures. Teams can plan ahead for future license purchases, maintain compliance rates by conducting internal assessments and purchase software that adds value to the organization, thereby avoiding high costs or compliance risks.

5. Ensure high levels of end-user satisfaction

Maintaining SLA levels is one of the most daunting tasks for service desk teams. Any SLA violation leads to frustrated and angry customers, which causes loss of credibility and revenue for the organization. A real-time SLA dashboard can detect ticket priority and assignment and can measure service desk performance against end-user service levels. Using this information, teams can set realistic SLA goals, automate and route ticket assignments, communicate risks of SLA violations and set up escalations proactively.

The importance of analytics is quite clear when it comes to enhancing IT service delivery. Empowering users is the first step toward achieving any form of process efficiency.