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The majority (89 percent) of IT groups in mid-sized companies are still in the early stages of IT management maturity and focus on day-to-day IT management tasks that are often time-consuming and manual, according to a global survey of approximately 500 mid-sized companies. Kaysea, a cloud-based IT management software vendor conducted the survey.
The other 11 percent of survey respondents have achieved higher levels of maturity and are reaping benefits in important ways for the business.
Overall, 40 percent of survey respondents reported staffing, resources and time as the three biggest challenges that IT operations face in 2015.
However, the survey shows no correlation between the size of a company and its IT management maturity level, suggesting that companies of all sizes can benefit from investments in maturing their IT operations.
Two-thirds of companies at the highest IT management maturity levels have formal service level agreements (SLAs), and for more than half of these companies, meeting their SLAs is mandatory.
The report placed the respondents into five IT management maturity levels that match their organization’s current IT service management level. The categories are reactive, efficient, proactive, aligned and strategic.
For companies at efficient or proactive levels of IT maturity, 40 percent monitor service levels but their SLAs are primarily guidelines only. Only 22 percent of reactive level companies have formal SLAs but, primarily as guidelines, the survey found.
In addition, companies at the aligned or strategic levels of maturity are, on average, approximately 60 percent more likely to use cloud-based applications and infrastructure than companies at the lower levels.
They are about 90 percent more likely to use them than companies at the reactive level. Over 40 percent of companies at all three lower levels have a “no public cloud use” policy.
More than half (59 percent) of all survey respondents use automation for management activities, including deployment or remediation.
For companies that grew their revenue at greater than 10 percent between 2013 and 2014, 36 percent were considered to have reached the highest maturity levels, versus 11 percent for the general population in the stud. IT organizations at the highest levels of maturity are almost twice as likely to report that they drive IT decisions, instead of their CEO or chief financial officer (CFO).
“It’s never too late – and no IT group is ever too small – to start taking control of IT processes,” the report noted. “Developing a highly mature, highly respected IT group is not a function of company size, IT group size, or industry. IT infrastructure complexity is not going to go away.”