Increasing Value to the Organisation - the Top 2015 Priority Says UK Public Sector Service Desks

A new report from the Service Desk Institute (SDI) and Cherwell Software™ reveals the 2015 challenges, priorities and opportunities for IT service desk teams within the UK public sector. This first-of-its-kind UK research, conducted by the SDI, aims to secure a lay-of-the-land snapshot for future benchmarking purposes and to identify areas of success, growth and potential areas for improvement.

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The top three 2015 priorities as identified by survey respondents: ‘increasing value to the business’, ‘managing change within the organisation’ and ‘reducing costs’ tied with ‘restructuring the support model’. In regards to the biggest challenges, ‘doing more with less’ (42 percent) far surpassed other possible answer choices, with ‘updating new technology’ (18.75 percent) placing second. 

Other key findings from the research include:

• 90 percent of respondents predict their service desk teams will require additional skills during the next two years to support customer demand
• 79 percent have formal, written SLAs with their customers
• 68 percent of respondents say their service desk does not carry out regular staff morale surveys
  
  

In regards to BYOD, the report finds the UK public sector slightly behind its private sector counterparts. 42 percent of respondents in SDI’s wider 2013 benchmarking report currently support BYOD compared to 37 percent of respondents to this survey. However, in regards to how UK public sector service desks empower their customers and free-up themselves to focus on more technical activities, nearly 73 percent of respondents have implemented a self-service portal, surpassing the industry average of 68 percent. 

Tessa Troubridge, managing director at the Service Desk Institute, commented, “2015 will be a challenging year for public sector service desks as they aim to increase value to the business, improve what they have and increase first time fix rates. However, with more than a third of respondents identifying ‘becoming more customer focused’ as a top priority for 2015, this research demonstrates the commitment service desk teams across the public sector have for meeting customer requirements.”

Tony Probert, European managing director for Cherwell Software, said, “There is a lot of interest within the service desk community around benchmarking and how a team’s performance, across and within industries, compares. This kind of research provides great opportunities for all those working in IT service management to identify ways to improve their service offering.”

The research, conducted by SDI from August to November 2014, drew respondents from a cross section of UK public sector organisations, including Councils, NHS Trusts, Central Government and Emergency Services. Survey questions included those based on SDI’s wider industry benchmarking survey (carried out every other year) and questions specific to the UK public sector. Of respondents, 66 percent were service desk and ICT managers, 14 percent were service desk team leaders or supervisors, and 20 percent hold other roles such as IT Director. The majority (89 percent) work on a service desk that supports internal customers.

A full copy of the report along with an infographic are available for download.

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