A new survey from business transaction management (BTM) firm OpTier has revealed that three quarters of UK IT managers are baffled by the complexity of their IT management set-up.
The survey quizzed 2,000 UK IT decision makers from businesses with over 1,000 workers and covered a wide variety of verticals, including retail, government, finance, telecoms and manufacturing.
The survey uncovered some worrying figures about the financial implications of having a complex IT management set-up. Over half (57%) of respondents admitted that complex and ineffective management tools are costing their company an average of £4.64m each year in downtime and staff time.
The research also found that the vast majority (72%) of companies are relying on using server/network uptime as a measure of business service visibility – meaning that checking an application’s performance simply involves checking whether the server is up and running or not.
“Businesses find themselves facing management tool overload, meaning that complex IT environments become even more costly and, ironically, more difficult to manage. It’s like trying to watch several TV programmes at once, totally confusing,” said Motti Tal, founder and business development manager, OpTier.
“This is hitting businesses hard – according to our research two thirds of businesses have to deploy three people and still take an average of two days to fix any one problem, as they have no simple way of pinpointing its origin,” Tal said.
Two thirds of those businesses quizzed said that they are using more than three tools to monitor the IT environment, and 16 per cent are using more than five.
Russell Rothstein, VP product marketing at OpTier, told CBR that companies are taking the wrong approach to IT management. “Businesses need real visibility, there is no point having five, six or seven monitoring tools open if you can’t keep up with them. Companies should not manage things from an IT point of view, it needs to be from a business point of view,” he said.
OpTier’s CoreFirst, a business transaction management software, provides a single view of the transaction process, from the customer-facing elements to back office requests.
“Business must remember that complexity costs money and taking a simple, holistic view at the transaction management level can be the key to not only quick problem resolution, but, vitally, to problem avoidance and IT cost reduction. By making management easier, IT can demonstrate its value to the business rather than being seen solely as a cost centre,” said Tal.
