IT KPIs – Tracking The Results of Your Business IT Support

How can your organization best determine whether your IT department is effective? When your organization launches new IT initiatives, how can you identify which ones are successful initiatives (and which ones aren’t)? As with many areas of business, tracking the effectiveness of your IT support comes down to tracking the right key performance indicators. Here’s how to tell if you are getting what you pay for from your managed service provider.

The IT KPI’s Your IT Support Should Be Impacting

In our data-centric world, there are dozens upon dozens of different metrics we can use to track the performance of just about anything. However, there are some core key performance indicators that are most useful when determining whether your IT support provider is truly effective. Here are some key IT KPIs:

• Time-to-resolution. Time-to-resolution and time-to-escalation will be the first metric that tells you how responsive your IT support team is and whether they are addressing issues as quickly as possible. If these numbers start to lag, it is possible that your MSP has become overly burdened with work or is no longer operating as effectively as it should.
• Network incidents. If TIer 1 and Tier 2 service-level incidents are occurring with greater frequency, then it is likely that your MSP isn’t operating as it should be. Your organization’s services should be regularly compared to their service level agreements to ensure that the organization is still getting the level of service promised.
• Security incidents. Security incidents now comprise a great deal of what MSPs are intended to manage. If security incidents are steadily rising, then there may be vulnerabilities that need to be sealed or upgrades that have to be invested to improve your organization’s infrastructure.
• Total IT spend. MSPs are designed to save your organization money. Not only should IT spend be going down when you engage with an MSP, but your IT team should be finding ways to improve upon your organization’s profit by reducing your bottom line.
• Total ticket volume. Total ticket volume going up over time — all other things remaining equal — can indicate that employees are experiencing larger and more significant IT programs. Taken in context, ticket volume can indicate issues with your core technologies.

Every company is different. If your organization currently has challenges regarding specific areas of your IT performance, then those IT metrics may become more important.

Getting the Right Data for Your IT KPIs

How can you get the right data for your KPIs if your MSP is tracking your information? The right MSP should be able to provide both basic, daily reports as well as more comprehensive, monthly reports. A deeper dive into your reporting should be established on a quarterly basis, where your organization can review any problem areas or pain points.

Reporting is absolutely essential for the right MSP. If your MSP isn’t able to give you in-depth reports regarding their own performance, it will become impossible to know whether they are operating effectively or whether they are improving or degrading over time.

Do you need to improve your organization’s KPIs? Red River can help. contact Red River today to begin the process of onboarding.