I was given a task a while back to show value of our ITIL processes, and came up with the idea is that you want to keep incidents out of the hands of our level 3 support (system analysts and programmers), and stay within the help desk,.where the cost to resolve an incident is lower, resolution time is quicker, and customer satisfaction is highest. All you need to do is trend data over time,and compare you can find areas of improvement.

Looking at this chart of data pulled from ServiceNow we track

Gray - The number of CHG (Change Records) introduced for a particular application

Yellow - The number of Knowledge Based Articles Published by a particular application team

Purple - The number of times any of the above KB articles were viewed

Blue Line - The number of INC (incidents) closed by the Application Staff (Level 3 Support)

Green Line - The number of INC (incidents) closed by the help desk for that application (Level 1 & 2 support)

GRAPH OF AN EFFECTIVE TEAM SUPPORT MODEL

1) The INC ratio for INC (incident) records is more than 2 to 1

2) Strong use of KB articles, and user view to support the KB articles are in fact being used

Note: user or staff may not be marking them as useful, but you know that they are being viewed (i.e. used to some extent)

3) An increase of CHG (change) records typically produces a spike in incidents, and good knowledge can deflect the cost from your level 3 support staff

GRAPH OF AN INEFFECTIVE TEAM

1) The INC ratio is inverse of an effective group

2) Almost non existence use of KB articles, even though KB articles are being viewed

You could easily correlate this into an ROI for the cost of supporting an application

i.e. How much time does a typically incident cost , and how many of those are having to be resolved by your Level 3 staff?

Where do you start? Phase 1 you can concentrate on the TOP 10 (non helpdesk) Groups that resolve incidents.

You can do this for those individual teams, or even for your organization as a whole, and see where improvements on knowledge could make the biggest impact to helping your company. Most helpdesk support centers strive for FCR (First Call Resolution), and the more knowledge they have the more effective they can be. Higher FCR's inevitably correlate to a happier customer experience and satisfaction with IT, and a lower overall cost to your organization.

KNOWLEDGE = POWER

Please remember to "LIKE" this if you find this methodology useful, or at least thought provoking to solving your own efforts for showing value or ROI for ServiceNow.