How to justify the cost of your IT department?

A comprehensive and easy to use service catalog will help to increase your IT department’s efficiency while making the value of your IT work more visible to upper management, giving your department the power to justify depart­ment costs with ease and clarity.

Portfolio management must be accomplished with a complete service management tool.

As the nerve center of almost any company, the IT department always has plenty of work to do. From setting up a new email account or installing software for a new employee, or upgrading servers and securing databases, the tasks performed by the IT department and service desk enable the rest of the company to operate smoothly and successfully. High-level management now understands the key role that IT plays in keeping the company’s gears turning, and the importance of ensuring that the IT department itself functions as smoothly and efficiently as possible. A comprehensive and easy to use service catalog will help to increase your IT department’s efficiency while making the value of your IT work more visible to upper management, giving your department the power to justify department costs with ease and clarity.

The use of an effective service catalog has a number of benefits:

• Its ability to facilitate under­standing between the user requesting the service and the IT department.
• Each service listed in the catalog includes a service level agreement (SLA) to establish reasonable expectations regarding the time frame of the service, a description of the service and how to fulfill it, who may make a request for the service, and any relevant costs. 
• From the perspective of the end user, a service catalog with a straightforward interface allows for the easy submission of work re­quests and imparts a clear understanding of the path those requests will take and what they should expect in the execution of their requests. They may also have the ability to check on the status or progress of their service request, enabling the user to remain informed and update their expectations for completion. 
• For the IT department or ser­vice desk employee, a clear service catalog will enable them to ensure that they have all the tools necessary to complete the task, respond quickly and easily to requests, and improve the level of their customer service.

C2 enables your IT department and service desk personnel to justify department costs to management, making it clear that your department is yielding significant savings and even profits for your company.