If you’ve worked in IT long enough, you’ll know that we’re usually very focused on operational or process optimization as a business function. This is an efficiency “play,” with improvements made to speed things up and reduce costs. It makes sense – well, at least on the face of it – because IT has long been viewed as a cost center, with it seen as important to reduce the financial overhead of IT (and IT support in particular) to the wider business.
But is this process optimization work, focusing heavily on IT efficiency and productivity, always in your organization’s best interest? Or is at least some of it potentially sub-optimal, with it missing the real productivity issue for your IT organization?
Interested? This blog explains more.
A common piece of IT suboptimal decision-making
This example is nothing new. However, it’s still one of the most relevant ways to describe the disconnect that can happen between your IT organization’s process optimization (and productivity improvement) and the impact on business operations and outcomes. It’s a simple improvement with a not-so-obvious business impact.
Your business process improvement efforts shave a minute off your IT service desk’s incident management process average ticket handling time. Someone does the math; this improvement saves 5000 minutes of service desk agent time a month (based on 5000 incident tickets) and 60000 minutes a year (or half a person in FTE terms, not that there’ll likely be any staff savings banked). Incidents are resolved one minute quicker, which is great for end-users, right?
The answer is that we don’t know using only traditional IT metrics. The time (and potentially cost) savings are great, as is the increased speed of incident handling. But, as the commonly-used management adage states, “change doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”
The business impact of the IT saving
It could be that the one-minute time-saving in IT is also “felt” positively by the end-user, with them gaining a minute of extra productivity. However, this might not be the case, as the change adversely affects the end-user experience and productivity because IT operations efficiency gains don’t always translate into a more productive workforce.
I probably don’t need to state this, as you’re already likely ahead of me – that one-minute IT time saving might hinder end-users more than it helps them.
The adverse impact could purely be a time and cost trade-off, where the end-user loses a minute of productivity or even more because of the change. The net result of the change is, at best, neutral. However, while beneficial to IT, it could be detrimental at a business level – with end-users losing more productivity than IT gains.
But it could be worse
It could be that the process optimization is equivalent to “corner cutting,” which has a more significant adverse impact on end-users (while benefitting IT). For example, the one-minute saving could be the cessation of the service desk agent checking to see whether the end-user issue has been resolved. The ticket is closed, but the issue potentially remains, and the end-user continues to lose productivity.
We see this outcome in our experience data, with “My ticket was not solved” accounting for half of our customers’ negative incident handling experiences (even with their investments in experience improvements).
IT’s focus needs to change
Hopefully, this simple example demonstrates that IT’s focus needs to change. It needs to move from an “inside-out” to an “outside-in” perspective in terms of the strategies, policies, processes, and practices necessary to ensure that IT-focused (and beneficial) operations and improvements aren’t problematic or suboptimal at a business level.
Your IT organization can’t continue to overlook the impact of IT support actions, particularly on end-user productivity, nor only use performance metrics – such as those included in service level agreements (SLAs) – that focus on IT operations but don’t consider end-user outcomes.
Process metrics and productivity
Your IT metrics are likely laser-focused on IT productivity, and your IT SLAs likely prioritize these IT “process” metrics over end-user outcomes. It results in what’s known as the “watermelon effect,” where IT’s metrics look positive (green) on the surface, but the end-user perspective (happiness and productivity) is “red” beneath.
While happy that it’s improving its own productivity, your IT organization is likely blind to its impact on the wider workforce’s productivity. It does not know whether what it does – operationally or in terms of improvements – helps or hinders end-users. This is the real productivity issue for your IT organization.
Understanding end-user productivity issues through experience data
There’s a need to supplement your traditional SLA metrics with experience measures. These “XLAs” measure the actual outcomes of IT support (rather than simply process efficiency) and end-user happiness. They highlight your IT organization’s real productivity issues – the time end-users lose to IT services, including IT support.
Without the insight of experience data, your IT organization potentially does the management adage of “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” – where its effort is somewhat futile because it ignores the bigger issue(s). For example, it doesn’t matter how efficient or productive your IT service desk is if it isn’t meeting business needs. This applies to both the status quo and the focus of your improvement efforts.
Ask any senior manager what matters most to them and their teams. I’m sure they won’t call out IT efficiency ahead of the productivity of their people. Of course, the IT organization must strive to improve efficiency, but this shouldn’t be at the expense of end-user productivity. This is the real productivity issue for your IT organization, with experience data the only way to truly understand how well your corporate IT capabilities are facilitating business operations and outcomes.
If you want to learn more about identifying and addressing end-user productivity issues, take a look at our IT Productivity Measurement.
