As your help desk adopts best practices, its efficiencies can impact your company's overall bottom line significantly. One way of tracking this relationship, says Bob Wooten, author of Building & Managing a World Class IT Help Desk (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 2001), is through your company's total cost of ownership (TCO) for desktop PCs.

It will take time for many of these efforts to reduce costs. For example, instituting a user training program will incur costs up front but should return benefits for the long term in terms of reducing downtime in engaging with the help desk or experimentation. This will help demonstrate that your help desk is a strategic investment and over time this investment will pay dividends.

Download the tool to enter estimates for your own organization.