'Industry Standard'....Qty of Incidents

[sbullough]

Hi,

Is there an industry standard for the number of Incidents per user per month?

I realise that this depends on the type of user, infrastructure, apps, thin/fat client (i.e. a lot of variables), but is there a 'guideline'?

For some reason I have 1.2 incidents per user per month in my head, but how far (or near) is this to the mark?

Thanks

[UrgentJensen]

Hi sbullough,

There is no industry standard and anyone that tells you there's even an industry average will have a hard time explaining themselves.

It's not important, what is important is what is suitable for your business/customers.

Cheers,

UJ
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[Diarmid]

sbullough,

a standard is a criterion or something to aim for. If there were a standard for this it would be published somewhere authoritative. Perhaps you are asking if there is some set of figures that are generally considered acceptable of good?

However you go part way to explaining why there cannot be such a figure yourself when you refer to "type of user, infrastructure, apps, thin/fat client (i.e. a lot of variables)". Even from this list your "guideline" would have to evaluate the difference that each of these variables makes and to do that you would need to get much more explicit and definitive about things like "type of user".

There are two other very obvious reasons why such figures do not and cannot exist. Firstly you would need to have a clear and consistent definition of what an incident is, not from a book but from what is actually done (try to find out what every organization actually treats as an incident!).

But the biggest reason of all is that in practical terms the data is inaccessible. Think about the the effort required just to gather it, never mind all the clever things you would have to do to make it consistent across all the "lot of variables" you refer to. Just to give one example, how would you get consistent measures about the ease of use of different applications?
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[UKVIKING]

Diarmid and UJ have it

You are basic asking the following question

If all of us have a piece of string in our pocket... what is the average length of string

the problem with linking incidents against users and looking for statistics - depends on the type of users that u have

if you have seriously IT savvy staff, you may have fewer incidents - but bigger kinds of incident (more serious)

if you have the norm of people who use IT equipment, you may get more incidents because the technology may not be second nature to them

in addition,... if you dont provide helpdesk function, then the # of incidents per user would approach zero

And the monthly totals of incidents depends on too many variables
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