Companies routinely miss target resolution times for major IT incidents: survey

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Published: Friday, 11 December 2015 08:17

Although 90 percent of large businesses report experiencing major IT incidents throughout the year, only about half have a team dedicated to handling such occurrences, a new global survey of 400 IT professionals has found.

‘Major Incident Management Trends 2016,’ the latest survey on the state of IT emergency response, also discovered that nearly two-thirds of IT departments have target resolution times when an outage occurs, but three-quarters of them routinely exceed their target times.

The report, conducted by Dimensional Research and commissioned by xMatters, inc., cited a lack of standard processes for the shortcomings.

“Reliance on digital infrastructures has dramatically increased the impact and frequency of major incidents,” according to the report. “IT and business leaders within individual companies are mostly aligned on what constitutes major incidents and how to resolve them. However, standard definitions and processes are lacking between companies and across industries. Without these standards, IT departments lack benchmarks and best practices to help drive improvements.”

The survey found that nearly 60 percent of large organizations experience a major IT outage at least monthly.

“At long last, IT departments and business leaders are on the same page when it comes to recognizing the severity of business impact during a major incident and the importance of solving disruptions as quickly as possible,” said David Gehringer, principal at Dimensional Research and author of the study. “However, they’re unfortunately falling far short of their goals of solving problems on time and in an efficient manner, often due to poor alerting and communications management.”

Respondents from Dimensional Research’s latest survey of IT professionals primarily came from the United States, Europe, Asia, Mexico and Central and South America and Australia and New Zealand. Participant companies came from a mix of sizes – from large enterprises with more than 10,000 employees to medium-sized businesses with 1,000 employees – and from a variety of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, technology, healthcare, education and more.