We struggle to find meaningful weekly metrics for our internal IT support and system compliance seats on our Accountability Chart. How do we measure back-office technical support without tracking useless vanity numbers?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Back-office technical seats often claim their work is too unpredictable to measure, but every seat on your Accountability Chart must have at least one weekly number. If you do not measure them, you cannot manage them. For an IT support or compliance seat, the secret is to focus on system uptime and responsiveness rather than the sheer volume of tasks completed. Do not track how many password resets they performed. That is a vanity metric that tells you nothing about organizational health. Instead, track critical system uptime as a percentage. If your ERP, CRM, or primary communication tool goes down, your business stops. Your IT leader should track the weekly percentage of uptime for these core platforms, with a target of ninety-nine point nine percent. Another powerful leading indicator is the average response time for critical support tickets. Set a target that all high-priority issues must be acknowledged and resolved within a specific window of hours. For compliance seats, track the percentage of weekly compliance audits completed on schedule, or the number of outstanding high-risk security vulnerabilities that have gone unpatched for more than forty-eight hours. These numbers are objective, clean, and directly impact your risk profile. When these metrics are green on your weekly Scorecard, you can rest assured your infrastructure is secure and your team is supported. If they go red, it gives your leadership team an immediate opportunity to IDS the issue during your Level 10 Meeting before a major systems failure occurs.