Critical IT Decisions Being Made Without Accurate Business Insight
Kovarus, Inc., has announced findings from a recent survey of IT decision-makers regarding the visibility and effective utilization of IT assets.
The survey revealed that the key measurements and metrics critical to supporting a healthy IT ecosystem are not reliably captured and reviewed. Only 38% of IT professionals surveyed specifically make their investment decisions based on true alignment and value to the business. Many critical decisions are being made without the correct business insight putting the IT department at a disadvantage with business units who have an ear to external service providers.
Key survey findings include:
- 40% of survey respondents were not aware of their IT assets. This in effect means that a sizeable part of the operating budget managed by IT is not accounted for correctly. These expenses become a fuzzy 'allocated cost' to business units without the ability for IT to demonstrate accounting transparency and therefore inflating unit costs for some business units. As IT starts to act like and compete with service providers, it is imperative that costs and assets are understood and managed differently. Using asset management to discover and manage the commissioning/decommissioning practices is critical to remediate this situation. Without this, the future of configuration, capacity, investment and chargeback management practices will be in vain.
- 65% of the respondents reflected that they did not have the time, practices or tools to collect information on the utilization of their IT investments. That is, they did not have the capability of determining performance and capacity used on daily basis. This results in a reactionary approach when resources are exhausted and applications fail causing business outages. The premise for effective virtualization relies on multi-tenant economies of scale – but without effective capacity management, collective capacity needs cannot be determined. It is possible that the environment is often over configured by a factor of 15. Capacity planning is a fundamental basis to achieve these results and to prepare for a more fluid and dynamic environment. With performance management techniques, users receive the results they expect and IT can manage to business policy (such as SLAs).
- 44% of respondents surveyed currently have a mish mash of technology solutions in their data centers: most of the rest have defined some standards along with consistent purchasing practices. Those with the diverse technology selections will have considerable additional risk and costs associated with this complexity. They will also find it difficult to achieve the economies of scale associated with virtualization as they typically have many 'competing' platforms and struggle to achieve the level of integration afforded by standard offerings. Defining IT standards that represent unique business needs is a starting point, and sustaining the good practices and investment is the next: without strong governance practices, efforts will be wasted.
The survey was conducted by TeleVerde on behalf of Kovarus. The sample included North American CIOs, IT Directors and IT Managers.