IT infrastructure and operations professionals polled at CA Technologies’ Interactive IT Executive Forum reveal lost employee productivity and increased IT costs due to end-user problems with online applications.
IT professionals realize poor application performance can hurt customer satisfaction and ultimately the business, but recent poll results show that applications not behaving as expected can drive down employee productivity and do damage to IT department budgets by increasing the costs of solving problems.
According to a poll taken during the multi-city event, CA Technologies’ Interactive IT Executive Forum, more than half of approximately 400 IT professionals in attendance experienced in the past 18 months a “loss of employee productivity due to downtime/poor performance.” About 23% said “escalating costs of resulting issues and problems” could also be attributed to end-user problems with online applications, and nearly 12% felt their company had suffered some damage to the brand/company reputation. More than 10% reported drops in revenue and more than 4% said that they experienced high levels of customer churn.
The event featured speakers from CA Technologies as well as the end-user community. Ken Blackwell, vice president and chief architect for the Service Assurance Business Unit at CA Technologies shared the stage with moderator Michael Friedenberg, president and CEO of IDG Enterprise, as well as MIT Sloan School’s Peter Weill, chairman for the center of Information Systems and co-author of the book, “IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain.”
About 30% of the approximately 400 attendees polled said they were responsible for IT operations. More than 25% indicated they were in charge of the hardware and software infrastructure. Nearly 23% are tasked with the responsibilities surrounding the service level of critical applications and business services, and about 22% work in the area of critical application support and delivery.
For about 30% of attendees, the major theme of their IT organization in 2010 is “improving the overall efficiency of IT.” Nearly 24% will focus on improving the measurement of IT’s impact on business performance, and about 23% said in 2010 they will work to increase IT capacity/resources to drive business innovations. More than 16% will work toward “improving IT development and management processes,” while close to 7% are tasked in 2010 with defining a strategy for risk and compliance.
When it comes to availability and performance management, IT professionals polled recognize there is room for improvement. For more than one-third, the area most in need of improvement is acquiring visibility into end-user experience to receive problem alerts before end users are affected. Close to 30% would like to work on improving efforts around implementing an end-to-end performance management solution. More than 14% said they must improve their incident and problem management processes, while close to 12% indicated they need to implement better tools to manage availability and performance. And more than 11% said they must improve efforts around integrating their tool set to receive better information.
Still more than 63% of those polled said they were very (17.35%) or somewhat (45.92%) confident in their abilities to meet customer expectations with regard to application performance. More than 11% indicated they were “not at all confident” and more than 25% said they were not very confident to meeting customer expectations.
What’s your IT organization’s objective in 2010? Has application performance hurt your business? Have you been asked to continue to reduce costs while also increasing IT services to end users and customers? Leave a comment here or let me know at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.
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