IT service problems are a weekly occurrence for over half of businesses

We all experience the frustration caused by IT issues from time to time, but a new survey by Forrester on behalf of operations performance specialist PagerDuty reveals that 55 percent of IT and business decision makers in the US experience IT service problems at least once a week.

What's more worrying is that 53 percent found out about the problems via users or external customers rather than through internal monitoring tools. Also 54 percent of respondents said their companies lacked adequate incident and problem management processes or didn't provide enough information to identify where the problem comes from.

The study points out that these problems often occur due to the approach taken to incident management. Companies may use multiple non-integrated monitoring tools, resulting in overlapping notifications and multiple sources of information and causing information overload for support teams.

Disorganized corporate culture may lead to teams focusing on passing the blame rather than collaborating to resolve problems quickly.

"Today's businesses desperately need a better way to manage their expanding collection of enterprise technologies to guarantee greater reliability in an always-on world," says PagerDuty CEO Alex Solomon. "I believe that this latest study from Forrester Consulting confirms the effectiveness of the holistic approach to incident lifecycle management that we have pioneered at PagerDuty".

The study suggests that by adopting a more strategic approach to solving problems and creating a unified operations center to manage incidents the impact on the business can be reduced and user satisfaction will be higher.

There needs to be a command center that is responsible for a broad overview of incidents. The second element is an automation center that owns the entire life cycle of incident resolution tools. Finally a service center or service desk to act as a center of excellence within the IT organization.

Whilst this takes care of the day-to-day handling of problems, businesses also need to understand the strategic importance of IT services and identify those which are most crucial. Incidents which affect customer service should always be given precedence.

The full report us available to download from the PagerDuty website.

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