Not too long ago I was in a meeting with the CEO of a family-run enterprise. He told me the story of his immigrant grandfather. The grandfather came to the United States through Ellis Island and started what is today a very successful retail and distribution business. The CEO told me how simple it had been for his grandfather to measure the business results each week. In the original store, his grandfather kept two cigar boxes. One was for his bills and the other was for the receipts and cash. At the end of each week he would reconcile the receipts with the bills, and if there was money left over it was a good week. The business objective was to have 52 good weeks in a row every year, along with satisfied customers.

Fast forward three generations to our world. We have replaced cigar boxes, carbon paper and receipts with highly integrated business processes, mission-critical technology infrastructures and end-user technology that continues to become more sophisticated to keep up with the employees who use it. Unfortunately, the way companies measure the effectiveness of their technology support is too often exponentially more elaborate yet significantly less meaningful than the method used by my friend’s grandfather.

That’s because most IT departments continue to track how well they provide technology support, not how well that support boosts employee productivity.

Measuring Activities, Not Results
Ironically, many IT departments use inward-focused measures to gauge the effectiveness of their technology support. Even if they outsource support, they rely on internally-focused service level measures to monitor the outsourcing company. They’re not called service level agreements by accident. SLAs largely measure how effectively the outsourcing firm has delivered its services—not the impact of its service on user productivity.

A research study that Unisys conducted last year of 243 North American organizations provides further evidence of the need for CIOs to start measuring their department’s real impact on user productivity. One piece of the evidence: We asked the surveyed organizations what criteria they used to justify investments to improve user support. What was the No. 1 investment criterion that large organizations (at least $1 billion in revenue) cited? Not whether it would help the company to gain a competitive advantage. Not even whether it would boost user productivity. Rather, the primary justification was how much it would cost the IT department to make the enhancement to support services.

Yet our study uncovered a far more important reason today for measuring the impact of technology support on user productivity: Technology has become a key tool for employees who are “closest to revenue.” The salespeople, customer service reps, field technicians and other employees who have daily interactions with customers can determine whether business is gained or lost. If you aren’t measuring whether and how the technology and services you give these employees are making them more productive, how can they become more productive? How do you know if one technology tool is better than another for making the sale or fixing broken equipment? Or how do you know if one of your training programs is better than another for getting customer service reps to respond better to inquiries?