Whether an organization provides support internally or outsources it, service level agreements are an important base measure of the effectiveness of support. If employees’ technology problems are not being solved—if their laptops aren’t being repaired when they need them or their questions aren’t being adequately answered, for example—they won’t be able to perform their jobs. But SLAs generally are too limited to transactions between the support staff and users. They don’t encourage support staff to see past the immediate technology problem and look for ways that IT can help users do their jobs better. Furthermore, SLAs are often out of date a few months after they’re established. For instance, in a company that successfully institutes a customer relationship management system, sales and customer service professionals will see their dependence on technology increase rapidly. Salespeople who become dependent on the system to prepare for each day’s sales calls won’t tolerate the 24-hour ...

While most organizations continue to rely on SLAs, some companies are setting a new course for measuring the value of IT support. The winners could be named as “support leaders”—companies that were providing highly effective IT support. On the other hand, If you compare their answers to those of organizations that we can call as “support laggards”—those struggling to address the support challenge. Well, the observation is that leaders escaped the SLA trap and adopted more business-oriented metrics to gauge their effectiveness. Such metrics are far different from the typical “the technology is working” measurements. For instance, a business unit with a printer problem that required a technician to be dispatched to make a repair. The technician replaced a part on the printer but inadvertently erased all the settings and failed to test the printer to see if it worked after completing the repair. The technician saw the issue as resolved: He replaced the part. Yet after he left, no one coul...