IT Ops is also important in improving IT service quality

Martin Atherton’s recent blog post “Are your systems falling down on resiliency?” calls out some alarming survey results that all corporate IT and business executives should pay attention to. Chief among these is the finding that 20% of today’s companies have significant, business impacting IT disruptions each and every quarter. It’s even more alarming when these results are juxtaposed with a similar survey conducted by Managed Objects in June of 2007 which found that up to 50% of large enterprise companies have significant business impacting outages up to 5 times a year. Among the Retail Banking sector this percentage goes up to 67%.

It’s tough to look at these results and say that we’re getting any better – besides as a business colleague used to tell me: “you need at least three data points to make a trend.” And yet, when the layers of the onion are peeled away in the Managed Objects survey, respondents felt that a good percentage of these outages were caused by changes to the application configuration. In fact, about a third of Retail Banks responded that between 25% and 50% of IT outages were caused by application configuration changes.

And while this further affirms Martin’s call for better focus on application development processes, it also brings into play the need for better process and technology focus applied to IT Operations change and configuration management. Even with the best designs and most careful plans, well-built production business applications can deteriorate in quality over time as fixes and enhancements are applied. So, while IT service quality improvements can be obtained through better development processes and technologies, process and technology improvements need to carry through to today’s IT operational environment as well as to achieve long-term IT service quality improvements.