How to reduce MTTR by helping people get out of their own way

Reduce MTTR: two employees looking at a computer screen in an office

IT experiences regular waves of innovation, most recently with generative AI. Meanwhile, IT’s core imperatives remain constant. Year after year, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research consistently ranks reducing the frequency, duration, and impact of incidents and outages as the top operational objective for IT. That goal holds true for organizations of all sizes across industries globally.

The best-case scenario is to predict and prevent outages before they happen. When directly asked, “If you could choose one thing to do really well, what would have the biggest positive impact?” 43% of IT leaders chose “proactive response to incidents before they impact users,” according to a global EMA survey.

The next best scenario is to significantly reduce MTTR,¹ regardless of whether the “R” stands for “repair,” “respond,” “restore,” or “revive.” That effort begins with identifying and attacking the most significant influencers on time, the first “T” in MTTR.

The low-tech side of MTTR

A recently convened EMA research panel of IT leaders identified team engagement as the top time sink in MTTR. Asked to select the single most time-consuming phase of incident response, team engagement beat out both categorization and response.

Team engagement, incident communication, and collaboration also took first place when the panel identified the incident response phases that are most challenging or most in need of improvement.

Which phase is most time-consuming: biggest contributor to MTTR? Team engagement, incident communication, and collaboration: 30% It seems ironic that the biggest contributor to high-tech pain is the low-tech element of humanity. A closer look at that element shows that a significant portion of MTTR is wasted time—time spent waiting for information and action.

The question “What percentage of the MTTR is inactive time spent waiting for information or response?” revealed an almost shocking amount of wasted time:

27% said MTTR is 50% or more wasted time
42% said MTTR is 25% wasted time
19% said MTTR is 10% wasted time
12% said MTTR is almost no wasted time

When time is measured in dollars and business gained or lost, wasted time matters a lot.

What’s the problem(s)?

The people problem again took first place when naming the top two barriers to effective incident response. When asked about the time it takes to identify and engage the appropriate response teams, 58% of the research panel answered “30 minutes to an hour or more.” That time, whether 30 minutes or two hours, is wasted time. It’s also a significant and addressable portion of MTTR.

What are the biggest challenges to effective incident response and management? People--getting the right teams engaged and collaborating: 51%; lack of a unified view and dependency mapping of service elements: 39% A large part of the problem is the lack of a unified view, which, in turn, makes it almost impossible to fully grasp the business impact of any issue. This lack of actionable information makes it difficult to identify the right response team and inhibits collaboration.

Further complicating the picture is a labyrinth of manual processes and siloed tools that stand in the way of effective response. Disconnected and disjointed processes, systems, tools, organizations, and technologies turn every incident into the technological equivalent of a custom-made jigsaw puzzle—a time-consuming problem to be solved anew each time.

Finding a realistic solution

Platforms and solutions that facilitate information sharing, collaboration, and cross-functional workflows can directly address all these challenges, slashing MTTR with efficiency and automation.

A recent EMA research initiative showed that most IT leaders expect outage frequency and duration to continue rising. However, an intriguing 18% of that panel ran countertrend, stating that incidents and outages have decreased due to proactive systems they’ve put in place. Clearly, some organizations feel as if they’re fighting a losing battle while others are successfully taming the complexity.

ServiceNow offers many robust weapons in this battle, including an array of AI-fortified solutions. However, the most potent capability of all is the one that defines the company itself: the unified Now Platform, which shares a common architecture and data model and makes cross-functional workflows work for people.

Making old and new technologies work together with people puts teeth in ServiceNow’s claim that “when innovation works, the world works,” and those teeth can take a big bite out of MTTR.

Find out more about ServiceNow Incident Management capabilities.

¹ “MTTR” is a commonly used abbreviation in IT services and operations that can stand for “mean time to repair,” “mean time to restore,” “mean time to respond,” or “mean time to resolution.”