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Support Centers Need to Justify Their Existence - or Perish

The Enterprise IT support center has become a feature of almost every enterprise, but it is becoming commoditized and may be displaced by external service providers unless it can justify its existence.

That's the takeaway from a report of 205 North American technical service and support professionals, entitled Show Me The Value: Support's Mandate conducted by HDI and sponsored by CA Technologies.

The technical service and support industry keeps hearing the same thing — that they need to show their business value, but for most internal support centers, there's a conundrum. Too often, support is simply considered to be a cost center, and it has a difficult time justifying requests for additional resources and budget. It may be even considered a target for elimination.

The good news is that a number of support centers are working to demonstrate their value, and better support emerging technologies and new ways of doing business.

As the report points out, support centers are adjusting roles, increasing customer focus, and changing their metrics. But the question remains as to whether they are really in sync with the strategic vision of non-IT executives in their organizations. And if they're not, they may be viewed as a service that adds little-to-no value and is subsequently considered an irrelevant and unnecessary burden.

To deliver relevance and value, today's support centers transition from being reactive to proactively focusing on servicing the business. When support centers are viewed positively by the larger organization and are able to expand and improve the services they offer, their business value increases.

The support center fundamentally needs to understand the business strategy and how it translates into the end-to-end business process and its impact on the customer. For example, support centers need to demonstrate how their phone, email, chat and even person-to-person interactions are helping the business achieve its strategic goals.

Metrics need to be expressed in terms of increased productivity, effective and quality delivery of the business services and accelerating innovation. In reality, support centers must transition to proactive delivery and continuity of service rather than just fixing random problems as they occur, in the order that they occur.

For many organizations, the success and even survival of the support center depends on the ability to demonstrate business value in three key areas — people, process and technology — in terms of the metrics that quantify them.

In order to transition, metrics must transition. Alarmingly, 54 percent of respondents in the survey have not changed their metrics to better measure business value. Forty percent have added metrics, while 12 percent have subtracted metrics that did not show business value.

Some change is occurring with job titles and roles transitioning in forward thinking support organizations. Forty percent of support centers have added new job roles to address changes in their relationship with the business — including director of customer relations and service desk director — based on established ITSM frameworks, especially ITIL.

Just like in our personal lives where our communication is transitioning with Facebook, Twitter, Chat, Video calling, etc., support centers are looking to leverage these capabilities. More than two-thirds of respondents have purchased fully-featured ITSM tools and other solutions in areas such as social collaboration and analytics and reporting to address their changing relationship with the business, or plan to do so within the next year, according to the report.

To succeed, support centers can no longer wait for the phone to ring. They need to put in place processes and enable users to be a self-sufficient as possible to proactively preempt calls to the service desk.

They can also push for automation that correlates events and points to potential issues before they occur. And they need to report to the business on metrics that point to the business value derived from the Support Center.

ABOUT Robert Stroud

Robert Stroud is Vice President Strategy & Innovation, IT Business Management, CA Technologies.

Image removed.

Related Links:

www.ca.com

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Support Centers Need to Justify Their Existence - or Perish

The Enterprise IT support center has become a feature of almost every enterprise, but it is becoming commoditized and may be displaced by external service providers unless it can justify its existence.

That's the takeaway from a report of 205 North American technical service and support professionals, entitled Show Me The Value: Support's Mandate conducted by HDI and sponsored by CA Technologies.

The technical service and support industry keeps hearing the same thing — that they need to show their business value, but for most internal support centers, there's a conundrum. Too often, support is simply considered to be a cost center, and it has a difficult time justifying requests for additional resources and budget. It may be even considered a target for elimination.

The good news is that a number of support centers are working to demonstrate their value, and better support emerging technologies and new ways of doing business.

As the report points out, support centers are adjusting roles, increasing customer focus, and changing their metrics. But the question remains as to whether they are really in sync with the strategic vision of non-IT executives in their organizations. And if they're not, they may be viewed as a service that adds little-to-no value and is subsequently considered an irrelevant and unnecessary burden.

To deliver relevance and value, today's support centers transition from being reactive to proactively focusing on servicing the business. When support centers are viewed positively by the larger organization and are able to expand and improve the services they offer, their business value increases.

The support center fundamentally needs to understand the business strategy and how it translates into the end-to-end business process and its impact on the customer. For example, support centers need to demonstrate how their phone, email, chat and even person-to-person interactions are helping the business achieve its strategic goals.

Metrics need to be expressed in terms of increased productivity, effective and quality delivery of the business services and accelerating innovation. In reality, support centers must transition to proactive delivery and continuity of service rather than just fixing random problems as they occur, in the order that they occur.

For many organizations, the success and even survival of the support center depends on the ability to demonstrate business value in three key areas — people, process and technology — in terms of the metrics that quantify them.

In order to transition, metrics must transition. Alarmingly, 54 percent of respondents in the survey have not changed their metrics to better measure business value. Forty percent have added metrics, while 12 percent have subtracted metrics that did not show business value.

Some change is occurring with job titles and roles transitioning in forward thinking support organizations. Forty percent of support centers have added new job roles to address changes in their relationship with the business — including director of customer relations and service desk director — based on established ITSM frameworks, especially ITIL.

Just like in our personal lives where our communication is transitioning with Facebook, Twitter, Chat, Video calling, etc., support centers are looking to leverage these capabilities. More than two-thirds of respondents have purchased fully-featured ITSM tools and other solutions in areas such as social collaboration and analytics and reporting to address their changing relationship with the business, or plan to do so within the next year, according to the report.

To succeed, support centers can no longer wait for the phone to ring. They need to put in place processes and enable users to be a self-sufficient as possible to proactively preempt calls to the service desk.

They can also push for automation that correlates events and points to potential issues before they occur. And they need to report to the business on metrics that point to the business value derived from the Support Center.

ABOUT Robert Stroud

Robert Stroud is Vice President Strategy & Innovation, IT Business Management, CA Technologies.

Image removed.

Related Links:

www.ca.com

Hot Topics

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...