Where have all the tickets gone?

In a large and complex outsourcing organization, with millions of incidents being handled by hundreds of geographically dispersed workgroups, each workgroup is typically measured on the number of incidents it receives, the percentage it resolves, and the average duration for each incident it processes. Incidents that are misrouted will take longer to be resolved. This can lead to the situation where all workgroups are meeting their individual service levels, but the overall service still delivers poor customer satisfaction. In this paper we describe a new approach to analyzing the efficiency of an IT service organization using existing data to provide insight into the quality of incident transfer between workgroups. Based on this approach, we have developed a tool - the IT X-ray - that an analyst can use to quickly provide service organizations with an indication of where incident routing problems are occurring, leading to increased customer satisfaction and reduced delivery costs.