At a recent SDI event I posed two simple questions to the audience.
“Raise your hand if you know your organisation’s mission statement.” Out of fifty delegates, only a handful of hands were raised.
“Raise your hand if you know where your organisation wants to be in five years’ time.” This time even fewer hands were raised.
From these two simple questions, it should be pretty clear that those who did not raise their hands are going to encounter serious problems when attempting to grapple with the question posing as the title to this blog. How can we define our value, when we don’t understand the bigger picture of what our organisation does or is aiming for? How can we help them to get to where they need to be if we don’t know the destination of the journey that they are on? The answer – at least in part – is revealed in this month’s SDI exclusive members report titled, aptly enough What’s Your Value?
The reason behind the report is to aid and assist service desk professionals to start to think about how they can define and communicate their value to the wider organisation. Most service desks would agree that they need to get closer to the business – the tricky part is working out how. In response, this month’s paper pulls together some ideas for gaining access to key influencers whose support will be invaluable in raising the profile and stature of the service desk. The key is to share pertinent and useful information and tell the story of your service desk – don’t fall into the trap of working hard to gain an audience and then turn them off with reams of data and stats. Make sure you know your audience and what will be useful to them – if they’re after stats then share them; if they need to know how your service desk strategy ties in to theirs then make sure you come prepared with the answers.
There is no silver bullet for demonstrating business value, expect to say that service desks are business enablers and without you the business would not be able to function. If building the case for demonstrating your value seems insurmountable then please do not lose sight of the fact that you deliver excellent value and work tirelessly day-in day-out to keep the business moving forward – the value is within all of our service desks, the trick is to define it, share it and celebrate it.
If you aren’t already a member of SDI, find out how you can access this report here>
Daniel Wood, Head of Research, SDI
