How many IT professionals want to improve their IT operations management?

[stephenmann]

OK it's probably a gross generalization but people who work in IT love stats. I really should've made up a stat here; and said that "97% of IT people love stats (and the other 3% love themselves)." So here are some interesting stats …

Evolven, a provider of IT Operations Analytics solutions, conducted a survey of over 300 IT professionals at the Gartner Data Center Summit (Dec 5-9 '12) and ServiceNow Knowledge13 (May 12-16 '13). The full report is here but if you want to read the highlights, or you could argue "lowlights," first please read on …

The main headline?

"84% of IT professionals said that they want to significantly improve their IT operations management."

Sounds scary doesn't it. BUT IMO at least it's an honest view — it's all too easy to kid ourselves that we all do everything that's needed and that we all do it exceptionally well.

Some more granularity …

"More than half of the IT executives surveyed say that one of their greatest challenges comes from managing changes in their environments. Nearly 80% said that they can't automatically validate the accuracy of their deployments."

In response to some more granular questions about incident management:

• "When an incident occurs, can you quickly know what changed?" Only 7% of the IT professionals surveyed can quickly identify "what changed" prior to an incident occurring.
• "Can you quickly identify what is an incident's root-cause?" Only of 5% of the IT professionals surveyed can quickly identify an incident's root cause.

To avoid the over-dramatization of these stats it's probably best if we flip them round and take account of what is labelled as "average"

• 66% say that it's unlikely they'll know what has changed when an incident occurs.
• 68% say that it's unlikely they'll be able to quickly identify an incident's root cause.

So approximately 2/3rds are potentially "starting from scratch."

And so the IT organization continues to be "the cobbler's children"

Charles Betz's book "Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoe... amongst others talks of the issue IT organizations face — they are too busy delivering against the IT-needs of lines of business that they often neglect their own. Answers.com defines it nicely:

"The phenomenon where certain 'professionals' in any given area are so busy with work for their clients and their teams that they neglect using their professional skills to help themselves or those closest to them."

So what are you doing to help yourself to help your customers (and even your customers' customers)? How are you using technology and other solutions (such as problem management) to shorten the incident lifecycle? What are you doing to free costly, and probably scarce, people resource from firefighting incidents to address potentially bigger opportunities for the IT organization to create business value?

I'm not suggesting that you rush out and buy technology. All I am doing is suggesting that you spend the time to assess the status quo within your organization and the resource incident management consumes.

How could you improve the efficiency and effectiveness of incident management?

And the latter is important. Rob England (why do I always want to type "Englund"?) hits the proverbial nail on the head in his latest book "Plus! The Standard + Case Approach" when he states that:

"There is too much emphasis on efficiency and not enough on effectiveness."

So how could you improve? Your thoughts and comments are appreciated.