Reading through the 7th Annual ITSM industry survey

[SimonMorris]

Yesterday Consulting Portal and IT Optimizer released the 7th Annual ITSM Industry survey.

Interesting reading and I wanted to share my thoughts...

Geographical split of respondants

It seems that the survey was open to visitors to both the Consulting Portal and IT Optimizer websites, although I wasn't aware of the survey before the results were published.

I don't think there is much to read into the Responses by Country (slide 9) except to say that I was surprised that 91% of the respondents were from North America. India was the 3rd highest responding nation with no European countries listed.

One of the ITSM podcasts I listened to this week asked why European deployments of ITSM seemed to be more mature than other regions. Whilst writing this blog post I couldn't find anything on the Internet to prove or disprove that statement. In any case the responses by country were quite surprising.

SaaS is hot...

SaaS continues to be hot with 24% of respondents currently using one or more SaaS solutions for ITSM (Appendix page 29). 26% do not currently use SaaS but are investigating. 37% do not know their organisations position.

If we assume that half of those that don't know their position or are investigating will decide that SaaS is not for them we could expect that 24% to rise up to over 55% (?). I think that based on the sales chatter within ServiceNow we expect to win considerably more pitches than we lose so 55% of the total market might be low, especially as SaaS matures.

Comparing that with Appendix page 23 which asks the question "Which vendor(s) and product(s) do you use to support your ITSM processes".

We see ServiceNow, a purely SaaS provider at 15% with BMC at 16%. If we expect the SaaS market to go from 24% to conservatively 55% these could be interesting times.

... and ITIL is a 4 letter word

Just stoking the "ITIL is good, ITIL is bad" debate for at least one more blog post... Slide 13 talks about trends observed from the survey results and says that "ITIL is a 4 letter word"

Well - I didn't get that from the survey results. 85% of respondents utilize a recognised process framework (appendix page 10) and 94% of those are using ITIL (either version 2 or 3, appendix page 11).

For the question "Are you planning on adopting ITIL version 3" 56% of people said they are. You could reasonably say that the 84% of respondents who are already using ITILv3 would answer "no" to that question.

So I'm not really seeing the writing on the wall for ITIL here.

We're still doing the same old stuff

Appendix page 13 asks what respondents are planning to do in the next 3 to 6 months. I really wish they allowed respondents to choose multiple processes rather than a catch-all "We are planning on implementing multiple processes" which obscures the results a little.

But we can still see that Incident Management (8%), Change Management (7%), Asset and Configuration Management (5%) and Problem Management (4%) are still the biggest headaches for organisations.

Bit worrying really seeing as we have 85% of respondents saying they follow an ITSM process framework but we are still working on the basics of "fixing stuff", "stopping more stuff breaking" and "working out where everything is"

These core processes are critical but I would love to see more business aligned processes such as Capacity Management (3%), Request Fulfilment (3%) and Knowledge Management (2%).

With these processes being front-and-centre we would see users being empowered more with Knowledge and having more control over their environment with Request Fulfilment. Maybe even talking to the Servicedesk less with good Capacity Management.

Getting tuned into Governance... slowly

Lastly - I was really happy to see multiple questions asked about metrics and governance of ITSM.

IT departments evolved into a sub-culture within their parent organisations and weren't open to being measured. This still seems to be the case with 75% of respondents not being able to provide actionable data for their business (appendix page 15).

Is this the fault of the legacy tool vendors (BMC, CA, HP, IBM) that are sitting on 33% of the market (for now?). All of my experience with these vendors has been that reporting is horrible.

With all of the talk about taking the "IT" out of "ITSM" and being focussed on general business service management we see that only 36% have IT process improvement as part of a company-wide quality program (appendix page 20)

Only 29% have plans in place to be formally audited (appendix page 19) with 43% being audited at all (I presume informally?)

In any case, there is a significant minority of respondents that seem to be tuned into governance of ITSM. Not a majority by any means but we have a full 12 months until the next survey to raise that number.