The words ‘Customer Support’ and ‘Customer Service’ accurately describe the role of Service Desk and Desktop Support Professionals. Unfortunately, these words sometimes carry negative connotations, and do not accurately convey the strategic potential of user support, said Mr. Rumburg. “The result is that most organizations do not fully exploit the inherent leverage of user support to achieve a competitive advantage for IT.

MetricNet’s global benchmarking data suggests that there are multiple sources of leverage in a Strategic Support Organization and several underutilized metrics that can measure progress towards strategic significance. At the HDI Capital Area Meeting, Mr. Rumburg identified and defined two critical metrics and three sources of leverage supported by the empirical evidence from thousands of IT Service and Support benchmarks.