Understanding the true cost of service desk operations

Apptio has announced the public availability of Apptio Service Desk Insights™ for ServiceNow® (SDI). This new application gives IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals the ability to measure, report, and manage the cost and value of their ServiceNow support activities.

This new application empowers ServiceNow professionals to pinpoint and articulate what’s driving the cost of their incidents, problems, changes, and requests. SDI’s powerful analytics let users know which issues require more expensive personnel to address so that they are able to take control and run the service desk like a business.

First American Financial Corporation, an existing user of Apptio’s TBM applications, participated in the beta program for SDI. According to its senior director of IT, Peter McGarahan, “optimizing our service desk costs is vital to the success of this function and has a tangible impact on the bottom line of the business. The early successes we’ve experienced with Apptio’s SDI application allow us to understand the largest cost drivers of service-related activities, and to easily identify outliers and anomalies.”

A recent Gartner report “IT Service Desks Must Evolve for the Digital Workplace” by Jarod Greene, published September 4, 2014, concludes: “IT service desks use IT Service Support Management tools to better support the production environment by automating the tasks and workflows associated with the management and delivery of quality IT services to the business. However, these tools are not well-designed to manage relationships with the business, a requirement for the IT support organization of the digital workforce.” TBM addresses this gap in current ITSM solutions.

“Not only were we able to get up and running with SDI quickly, but we now have access to near real-time data to explain to the business where time and money are being spent to support customers,” said Chancey Cagley, Manager of the Business Support Centre with Empire Life. “The ability to correlate customer satisfaction to cost is an important part of how we demonstrate the value of our services to our business partners.”

“ITSM professionals now have the facts and insights they need to act as the CEO of the service desk. SDI delivers Apptio’s core capabilities of cost transparency, IT business management, and business analytics to ServiceNow customers.” said Sunny Gupta, CEO of Apptio. “We’re excited to offer this new application because it’s a quick and easy entry point for all IT professionals into the value that Apptio’s broader suite of TBM applications.”