How IT Can Score More Touchdowns
November 21, 2014

Matthew Selheimer
ITinvolve

Share this

IT has come a long way over the last five to 10 years. Issues like password resets, fixing VPN connections, and even spinning up virtual machines in the cloud for software development projects have become routine, and IT staffs can handle them quickly and easily with minimal loss of productivity (and revenue) for the business.

In fact, about 82 percent of IT incidents are handled in the expected amount of time, according to Pink Elephant. That sounds pretty good, and in some ways it is. The problem is that the number hasn’t improved much in recent years. IT has gotten really good at the basics, but the other 18 percent of incidents continue to take much longer to fix, negatively impacting productivity and potentially holding back the business.

It’s Fall, so let’s think about it in football terms. If your favorite team were really good at driving 82 yards but then couldn’t score a touchdown, it wouldn’t win many games by settling for field goals. The best teams excel at scoring once they get into the red zone, the last 20 yards standing between them and seven more points on the board. Those final 18 yards – or for IT, that last 18 percent – are extremely important.

And those aforementioned statistics are just for incidents. It’s even worse when we look at change management. A study by Forrester found that change success rates are 60-79 percent for most organizations. Nineteen percent of those surveyed reported that 40 percent of their IT incidents were self-inflicted wounds caused by IT changes and a whopping 31 percent didn’t even know what percentage of incidents were caused by changes!

Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of organizations could not make a change to their infrastructure on a weekly basis. In a world where businesses have to be agile and stable, those facts are disastrous. It means IT is holding those businesses back and it means that the change problem has to be tackled to get IT in the end zone.

Why haven’t we seen more improvement with “red zone” IT? I think we can agree for the most part we have good, talented people working in IT. By and large, we have good processes too. And with few exceptions, we have good technology. The truth is we’ve been using the same approaches and solutions over and over again and expecting different results. I think there’s a famous quote about how that ends.

Rather than trying to address the people issue with more training (useful always but not the answer), the process issue with another version of ITIL (I’m not holding my breath) or the technology issue with more tool customization or automations, it’s time – past time, really – to consider a new approach that takes advantage of all the untapped knowledge among IT staff and helps them collaborate much more effectively.

Imagine a whole new IT world where tribal knowledge surfaces in the heat of the moment when it’s needed, team members are able to collaborate in real time and all assets can be visualized with their interdependencies clearly shown so you can see where the ripple effects of changes will go both upstream and downstream.

As revolutionary as these ideas may sound, they don’t require much change to what you’ve been doing in an ad hoc matter already. It means getting out of tools that are all about tickets and moving away from SharePoint “document dumps” and putting the ball back in the hands of your human talent so they can collaborate better together for that final 18 percent. You don’t need to fire your players or coaches and tear down the stadium. What you need is a new playbook that takes full advantage of your personnel’s knowledge about your environment and helps everyone work together to move the team forward on every drive.

Right team + right tools + right information = right red zone IT game plan, and that means a lot more touchdowns! Stop settling for IT field goals and get your team into the end zone.

Matthew Selheimer is Chief Technical Evangelist and SVP of Marketing at ITinvolve.

Share this

The Latest

December 05, 2023

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, AIOps, Observability, OpenTelemetry and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2024. Part 2 covers more on Observability ...

December 04, 2023

The Holiday Season means it is time for APMdigest's annual list of Application Performance Management (APM) predictions, covering IT performance topics. Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM, observability, AIOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2024. Part 1 covers APM and Observability ...

November 30, 2023

To help you stay on top of the ever-evolving tech scene, Automox IT experts shake the proverbial magic eight ball and share their predictions about tech trends in the coming year. From M&A frenzies to sustainable tech and automation, these forecasts paint an exciting picture of the future ...

November 29, 2023
The past few years have presented numerous challenges for businesses: a pandemic, rising interest rates, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical conflict that sent shockwaves across the global economy. But change may finally be on the horizon. According to a recent report by Endava ... a majority of executives confirmed they are feeling optimistic about the current business climate, and as a result, are forecasting larger IT budgets, increased technology funding and rollout, and prioritized innovation in the coming year ...
November 28, 2023

Incident management processes are not keeping pace with the demands of modern operations teams, failing to meet the needs of SREs as well as platform and ops teams. Results from the State of DevOps Automation and AI Survey, commissioned by Transposit, point to an incident management paradox. Despite nearly 60% of ITOps and DevOps professionals reporting they have a defined incident management process that's fully documented in one place and over 70% saying they have a level of automation that meets their needs, teams are unable to quickly resolve incidents ...

November 27, 2023

Today, in the world of enterprise technology, the challenges posed by legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) systems have long been a source of concern for IT departments. In many instances, this promising solution has become an organizational burden, hindering progress, depleting resources, and taking a psychological and operational toll on employees ...

November 22, 2023

Within retail organizations across the world, IT teams will be bracing themselves for a hectic holiday season ... While this is an exciting opportunity for retailers to boost sales, it also intensifies severe risk. Any application performance slipup will cause consumers to turn their back on brands, possibly forever. Online shoppers will be completely unforgiving to any retailer who doesn't deliver a seamless digital experience ...

November 21, 2023

Black Friday is a time when consumers can cash in on some of the biggest deals retailers offer all year long ... Nearly two-thirds of consumers utilize a retailer's web and mobile app for holiday shopping, raising the stakes for competitors to provide the best online experience to retain customer loyalty. Perforce's 2023 Black Friday survey sheds light on consumers' expectations this time of year and how developers can properly prepare their applications for increased online traffic ...

November 20, 2023

This holiday shopping season, the stakes for online retailers couldn't be higher ... Even an hour or two of downtime for a digital storefront during this critical period can cost millions in lost revenue and has the potential to damage brand credibility. Savvy retailers are increasingly investing in observability to help ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience. Just ahead of the holiday season, New Relic released its State of Observability for Retail report, which offers insight and analysis on the adoption and business value of observability for the global retail/consumer industry ...

November 16, 2023

As organizations struggle to find and retain the talent they need to manage complex cloud implementations, many are leaning toward hybrid cloud as a solution ... While it's true that using the cloud is not a "one size fits all" proposition, it is clear that both large and small companies prefer a hybrid cloud model ...