SolarWinds Report Reveals Surprising Trends in ITSM Efficiency

SolarWinds has released its 2024 State of ITSM Report, which offers comprehensive analysis that could change how organizations approach IT service delivery.

The report, which analyzed data from more than 2,000 IT service management (ITSM) systems and 60,000 data points between July 2023 and July 2024, provides insights into what drives efficiency in IT service management. Most surprisingly, the analysis suggests that teams handling larger ticket volumes often demonstrate better performance than those with lighter workloads. The report also reveals that conventional solutions such as adding more service desk agents may be less effective than previously thought.

The key findings of the SolarWinds' 2024 State of ITSM Report include:

• Organizations average 21 hours for incident resolution, with times ranging from under 1 hour to more than 100 hours.

• Companies using automation reduce resolution times by 3 hours and decrease service-level agreement (SLA) misses by 11%.

• Knowledge base articles and asset management each reduce resolution times by 6 hours.

• Self-service portals cut resolution times by more than 2 hours.

• Financial services lead industries with the fastest resolution times (14 hours).

• The education sector has the longest resolution times (33 hours).

Related:Taking Help Desk Automation to the Next Level with Ticketless Service Desks

More Tickets, Faster Resolution: The Counterintuitive Truth

In what might surprise many IT professionals, the report reveals an inverse relationship between ticket volume per agent and resolution time. Organizations where agents handle higher numbers of incidents actually resolve them faster, contradicting the common belief that lighter workloads lead to quicker resolutions.

Source: SolarWinds 2024 State of ITSM Report

As to why higher ticker volumes per agent correlate with faster resolutions, RJ Gazarek, director of ITSM and database at SolarWinds, has a few ideas.

"We've thought a lot about the data points showing that higher ticket volumes per agent correlate with faster resolutions and have come to the conclusion that when you have an account with a large number of incidents, it's likely that this is a larger company that may have some more mature processes for handling tickets," Gazarek told ITPro Today. "Additionally, you'll likely learn how to close some tickets faster through repetition."

For example, Gazarek said that once an IT staffer has finished troubleshooting a VPN connection issue, the process for doing this can be more easily repeated, making future resolution faster. Also, because the volume per service desk agent is so high, organizations have to put mechanisms in place to get through them; otherwise, there will be many employees offline.

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"So basically, it's efficiency through necessity," he said.

Technology Stack: The Four Pillars of Efficiency

The analysis identifies four critical technologies that significantly improve service desk performance.

Automation emerges as a powerful tool, saving over 3 hours per ticket on average while reducing SLA misses by 11%. Knowledge base articles and asset management solutions each contribute to a 6-hour reduction in resolution times, while self-service portals accelerate resolution by more than 2 hours.

Most significantly, organizations implementing all four tools demonstrate the most impressive results, with average resolution times of 19 hours — a stark contrast to the 29-hour average for organizations using none of these tools.

Focus on Iterative Improvement, Not Sweeping Changes

While tools and processes are critical to ITSM success, doing everything at once might not be the best course of action.

"One thing we've seen is when teams try to make massive, sweeping changes, they spend a lot of time planning and creating the perfect system when they're often better served starting where they are today and making iterative improvements," Gazarek said. "There are a lot of efficiencies to gain waiting until it's all perfectly planned out, but it can end up losing a lot of wins/gains in the long run."

Rather than trying to overhaul the entire process and systems, Gazarek suggests that organizations set the standard they are currently operating at to solve the root problem of their extended ticket resolution time. If tickets are getting lost, it may be better for some teams to pivot to a central tracking model where agents and managers can see all requests in one place, making it easier to share the load. Perhaps tickets are being misassigned — by implementing an email IT request form, employees experiencing a problem can more easily explain what is wrong and IT departments can distribute tasks more efficiently and identify recurring pitfalls.

"Zeroing in what is overwhelming your IT department is the first step in reducing ticket resolution time and making everyone at the company more efficient," Gazarek said.