Scary IT Statistics (Part 1)

In 2008, Gartner Group conducted one of their many surveys, this one on IT Service Outages. A Service Outage was defined as the loss of an organization’s business productivity due to lack of availability or significant impairment of an IT Service supporting business processes. They divided the results on the cause of these outages into three basic categories:

• Technical (an actual hardware or software failure)
• Training (someone with inadequate technical skills)
• Process (a person or group not following good processes)

The results demonstrated what some of us know to be true already. Only 10% were the result of a technical failure, 20% due to technical skills, and SEVENTY percent caused by process issues. When we look at these figures, they represent more than 2/3 of the mix. Given our current economic climate and the focus so many businesses and agencies have on cost these days, how can it be possible to ignore this number, given that the loss of productivity, reactive procedures, and potential damage to reputation all COST MONEY?  Although spending has been reduced in most IT departments, what training dollars remain, continue to be focused on technical skills upgrades. This is great, and addresses both of the smaller components mentioned, but it doesn’t do much for the largest component.

It should be noted that, in addition, outages caused by violations of process discipline, people can’t follow a process that doesn’t exist or is insubstantial. Service Management is the practice of running IT like a business, integrated with the strategic objectives of the business. Part of the IT Service Management portfolio is ITIL, a refined set of interconnected processes for running an IT shop, developed over more than 25 years by every size and type of IT organization. ITIL provides a library of information compiled to aid any IT shop in providing the process framework necessary to ensure IT Services are directly and measurably impacting the business in positive ways.

With this type of information gathered for our use, it makes sense to pay attention to the most critical area of Service Delivery, IT processes that can be linked with successful delivery of business processes critical to support the overall strategic goals of the organization. Not doing anything about that 70% area while claiming IT is getting better — that would be scary.