IT is all in the measurement........

Added by The Editor, 3 months ago.

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How good is your IT department at delivering the services that internal users need? Probably not good enough, according to the results of a recent survey conducted by Forrester Research.

The market analyst company has just released research that finds that, on average, IT departments fail to meet service level agreements (SLAs) with the business at least 26% of the time. That's based on a survey of 389 IT decision-makers in the UK, Germany, France, the US and China.

Fifty seven per cent of respondents said poor application performance cost the business money through lost production and poor sales performance. They said it also negatively impacts customer satisfaction, hurts brand image, hinders strategic decision-making and impedes product development.

There are plenty of reasons for the failure to meet expectations, says Forrester Research analyst Jean-Pierre Garbani: too little co-ordination and dialogue between IT and its business colleagues is a major culprit, he found, alongside service level metrics that are too IT-centric and demonstrate little alignment with business needs.

"The ultimate judge of IT and business alignment is the end-user," he said, adding that the only way IT knows it is meeting end-user expectation is by measuring the availability, usability and accuracy of core business applications from an end-user perspective.

Comments

There are currently 2 comments about this blog.

Stephen, 3 months ago

It's a shame that the advice to 'align IT with the business', which has been pushed as good practice for so long, is still not getting through.

Victoria, 3 months ago

These findings are pretty poor. The trouble is too many IT teams still spend time firefighting rather than finding strategic ways to improve service delivery, communicate better what they're doing and also make it easier for end users to get hold of them when they have a problem or want to ask for technical help in developing new products and services. There are no easy answers, but I think the first issue to address is definitely communication between IT and business teams. And IT tools can be used to help! Think a chat room for IT issues or a wiki providing insight into IT FAQs.