By Scott Pope, Value Advisory Director, Nexthink
There’s an old saying that IT is like plumbing. You only notice it when things have gone wrong when you turn on the shower and there’s no hot water, meaning that the experts are generally only called in after the problem has occurred.
For decades, IT teams have tracked ticket volumes, mean time to resolution (MTTR) rates, and first-call resolution (FCR) percentages. Companies have endless dashboards, full of metrics showing how efficiently they handle these failures. I know many teams who work unbelievably hard and rightly pride themselves on these metrics.
The problem is that all this hard work isn’t making nearly as much difference as it should. By their very nature, IT tickets demonstrate failure because something that should be working now isn’t. What does a ticket actually represent? It means an employee has stopped doing their job because their tech has let them down. The ones who can be bothered then struggle with a portal or call IT for help, while the rest just suffer in silence. And one of the prime reasons is the use of the metrics above as a measure of success for IT teams.
You get what you incentivise
Most IT leaders don’t like to admit it, but the uncomfortable reality is that most of what IT has built; processes, portals, forms, and so on, have been designed to meet its own needs, not those of end users.
Think about what happens when IT makes a change. If there is a business impact, the employee must stop working, find a portal, pick up the phone, describe the problem in IT’s language (a language most employees don’t speak), and then wait. Wait for triage, or a resolution, or even just a callback. No wonder most employees (56%) find it easier to live with the problem instead.
Worse, the upshot of this is that IT’s metrics look better than ever. Calls to the helpdesk stagnate because people don’t want to wait on hold. Clunky portals and complex forms that make it difficult to log tickets? This results in unhappy employees, who are reluctant to raise tickets or speak to IT. Consequently, IT can show brilliant numbers about how few complaints there have been because they are inadvertently filtering out vast amounts of real demand. In short, too many IT teams have performance metrics that incentivise them to hide friction and failure, rather than eliminating it.
What’s the goal?
One key reason why IT teams default to metrics like MTTR and FCR is because there isn’t a clear directive about what the business is looking for from the department. Of course every CEO wants IT to provide better services and to improve productivity, while also reducing costs. But which of these takes precedence?
Having a clear end goal is essential to setting useful metrics. For example, if the priority is cost reduction, then metrics need to be targeted around efficiency. In this scenario, the most important metrics might be the number of automated resolutions, the recovery of IT capacity, and reducing the number of vendors in the tech stack. Conversely, a company with a high employee churn rate should be looking at the role that tech plays in worker dissatisfaction and focusing on boosting Digital Employee Experience (DEX) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) scores.
Thinking big
The role of IT is evolving rapidly. The days of installing / maintaining infrastructure and calling it a day are long gone. IT teams aren’t just expected to provide and maintain devices and applications; they’re being tasked with driving the key strategic goals of the enterprise.
To do this, all IT professionals – especially leadership – need two core skills. They need to be able to listen to their colleagues and they need to be able to get creative around solutions. A good example is the issue of employee dissatisfaction. In years gone by, this wouldn’t be seen as a problem for IT at all. Does the laptop work? Do they have access to the things they need? Then it was job done.
Today, there is virtually nothing that isn’t an IT problem in some form. Consider travel as one of the key sources of discontent. Why? Perhaps the booking platform is terrible? Or maybe people are struggling to have meetings on the road because of connectivity issues. These are problems that IT needs to be aware of and that they have the ability to fix, thus addressing a tangible enterprise pain point.
Consequently, IT needs to focus on business-outcome metrics, such as amount of friction eliminated, productive time that has been freed up, or value-added by new digital rollouts or initiatives. Otherwise, if success and failure are judged on ticket volumes and MTTR, IT will never get to the heart of what is actually being asked of it.
Enterprises have been through decades of rapid, comprehensive digital transformation that has fundamentally reshaped everything from software development to compute capabilities. It’s time for IT to do the same with support and leave these failure metrics in the past where they belong. Metrics should be directly tied to business benefits, such as friction points eliminated, productivity increased, or tasks automated, enabling IT to clearly demonstrate the value it is providing for the enterprise as whole.
Scott Pope is a Value Advisory Director at Nexthink and an accomplished IT leader, with senior level experience spanning all areas of IT Infrastructure and Project Delivery.
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This entry was posted on June 10, 2026 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Guest Post: Stop paying attention to failure metrics
By Scott Pope, Value Advisory Director, Nexthink
There’s an old saying that IT is like plumbing. You only notice it when things have gone wrong when you turn on the shower and there’s no hot water, meaning that the experts are generally only called in after the problem has occurred.
For decades, IT teams have tracked ticket volumes, mean time to resolution (MTTR) rates, and first-call resolution (FCR) percentages. Companies have endless dashboards, full of metrics showing how efficiently they handle these failures. I know many teams who work unbelievably hard and rightly pride themselves on these metrics.
The problem is that all this hard work isn’t making nearly as much difference as it should. By their very nature, IT tickets demonstrate failure because something that should be working now isn’t. What does a ticket actually represent? It means an employee has stopped doing their job because their tech has let them down. The ones who can be bothered then struggle with a portal or call IT for help, while the rest just suffer in silence. And one of the prime reasons is the use of the metrics above as a measure of success for IT teams.
You get what you incentivise
Most IT leaders don’t like to admit it, but the uncomfortable reality is that most of what IT has built; processes, portals, forms, and so on, have been designed to meet its own needs, not those of end users.
Think about what happens when IT makes a change. If there is a business impact, the employee must stop working, find a portal, pick up the phone, describe the problem in IT’s language (a language most employees don’t speak), and then wait. Wait for triage, or a resolution, or even just a callback. No wonder most employees (56%) find it easier to live with the problem instead.
Worse, the upshot of this is that IT’s metrics look better than ever. Calls to the helpdesk stagnate because people don’t want to wait on hold. Clunky portals and complex forms that make it difficult to log tickets? This results in unhappy employees, who are reluctant to raise tickets or speak to IT. Consequently, IT can show brilliant numbers about how few complaints there have been because they are inadvertently filtering out vast amounts of real demand. In short, too many IT teams have performance metrics that incentivise them to hide friction and failure, rather than eliminating it.
What’s the goal?
One key reason why IT teams default to metrics like MTTR and FCR is because there isn’t a clear directive about what the business is looking for from the department. Of course every CEO wants IT to provide better services and to improve productivity, while also reducing costs. But which of these takes precedence?
Having a clear end goal is essential to setting useful metrics. For example, if the priority is cost reduction, then metrics need to be targeted around efficiency. In this scenario, the most important metrics might be the number of automated resolutions, the recovery of IT capacity, and reducing the number of vendors in the tech stack. Conversely, a company with a high employee churn rate should be looking at the role that tech plays in worker dissatisfaction and focusing on boosting Digital Employee Experience (DEX) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) scores.
Thinking big
The role of IT is evolving rapidly. The days of installing / maintaining infrastructure and calling it a day are long gone. IT teams aren’t just expected to provide and maintain devices and applications; they’re being tasked with driving the key strategic goals of the enterprise.
To do this, all IT professionals – especially leadership – need two core skills. They need to be able to listen to their colleagues and they need to be able to get creative around solutions. A good example is the issue of employee dissatisfaction. In years gone by, this wouldn’t be seen as a problem for IT at all. Does the laptop work? Do they have access to the things they need? Then it was job done.
Today, there is virtually nothing that isn’t an IT problem in some form. Consider travel as one of the key sources of discontent. Why? Perhaps the booking platform is terrible? Or maybe people are struggling to have meetings on the road because of connectivity issues. These are problems that IT needs to be aware of and that they have the ability to fix, thus addressing a tangible enterprise pain point.
Consequently, IT needs to focus on business-outcome metrics, such as amount of friction eliminated, productive time that has been freed up, or value-added by new digital rollouts or initiatives. Otherwise, if success and failure are judged on ticket volumes and MTTR, IT will never get to the heart of what is actually being asked of it.
Enterprises have been through decades of rapid, comprehensive digital transformation that has fundamentally reshaped everything from software development to compute capabilities. It’s time for IT to do the same with support and leave these failure metrics in the past where they belong. Metrics should be directly tied to business benefits, such as friction points eliminated, productivity increased, or tasks automated, enabling IT to clearly demonstrate the value it is providing for the enterprise as whole.
Scott Pope is a Value Advisory Director at Nexthink and an accomplished IT leader, with senior level experience spanning all areas of IT Infrastructure and Project Delivery.
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This entry was posted on June 10, 2026 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.