Feb
17
An article from Cio.com title "The Productivity Gap Between Mid-Market and Large IT Shops" really struck a cord with me. The IT service management consulting at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) performed an analysis of recent data trends and found that:
"IT departments in Fortune 1000 enterprises actually are more productive and effective service providers than mid-market counterparts—and it has nothing to do with the amount of staffers or money spent."
Having worked in both large and mid-market IT shops, my experience supports their findings, consider the following results from their research:
- Ninety percent of mid-market IT organizations use manual processes.
- Seven out of 10 calls for IT support are a direct result of incorrect operating procedures, meaning self-inflicted by the IT staff.
- Eight out of 10 IT system outages are caused by a failed change—meaning, an IT staffer "didn’t take the time to consider the ramifications of making a change to the infrastructure,"
- As much as 80 percent of the actual IT department is replicated by "shadow IT" workers in the business because IT is too busy to service their customers effectively.
- Research from EMA and The Standish Group show that approximately 70 percent of mid-market IT projects fail.
- Larger companies of the Fortune 1000 support almost three times—2.9 times, to be precise—as many users per IT staff member than mid-market companies….. The Fortune 1000 user-to-IT-worker ratio is 512 users for every one IT worker; in the mid-market, the ratio is 175-to-1…..this makes "mid-market IT organizations only about one-third as effective as their larger Fortune 1000 cousins.
The reason for the different in large and mid-market organisations is not about the money spent of IT and it’s not about the number of staff. The primary difference is in the productivity of the IT organisation. The reason for the low levels of productivity in mid-market organisations are due to:
- Lack of specialisation: The research found that mid-market organisations have "more generalist approach with a shared team and few if any specialists…. These teams work harder and have less time to dedicate to any particular technology or specialization".
- Poor IT processes: "IT is too busy to adopt huge [process-oriented] frameworks like ITIL, Six Sigma, CobiT or formal IT project management," Marquis writes. "But the reason they are so busy is precisely because they have no formal processes…. average IT organization is its own worst customer and responsible for most of the outages to which it finds itself reacting," he writes. "In fact, most of the work going on in the average IT organization is not productive work at all, but rather is re-work."
This research provides some interesting insight into mid-market IT organisations. If you’re working in a mid-market IT organisation investing in robust IT processes and specialisation can significantly increase the productivity of your IT shop.
Technorati Tags: Specialisation, Strategy, Research, Process, ITIL, COBIT
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I can really relate to both of those reasons. We actually used to have more specialists but after 9/11 like all other IT shops we had to do more with less, which forced us to go generalist. We’ve got everyone doing everything because that is what the budget dictates. But it is precisely for that reason that we don’t have well-defined processes - too many cooks in the kitchen and not enough time to write a recipe book!
Bill
[...] of IT service management and architecture, take a look at this post about the productivity gap between mid-market and large IT shops when it comes to efficiency and [...]
[...] of IT service management and architecture, take a look at this post about the productivity gap between mid-market and large IT shops when it comes to efficiency and [...]