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A new study from Ventana Research looks closely at IT Performance Management (ITPM), benchmarking the maturity and direction of ITPM. The research is significant, Ventana says, because IT's ability to perform well in difficult economic times is vital, and organizations are especially dependent on IT's ability to optimize processes and manage its own performance.
The practice of ITPM helps organizations evaluate how IT is delivering value. The ongoing growth and increasing complexity of applications, networks, systems and services makes the management of technology a difficult task, Ventana says, and IT organizations need reliable information about how multiple components are performing.
With the benchmark study, "Realizing Successful IT Performance Management," Ventana aims to better understand how IT can accomplish ITPM, as well as how business and IT managers view the effectiveness of their organization's management of IT performance.
Ventana says it found that ITPM is beginning to make a "critical difference" for IT. Three-quarters of the organizations surveyed see increasing IT effectiveness in supporting business processes as a top benefit of their IT investments.
According to Ventana's analysis, the largest percentage of organizations surveyed (32%) are at the "strategic" level, the second-highest of its four maturity levels. These organizations regard ITPM as an important goal and are taking steps to accomplish it, the firm says. The organizations at the highest "innovation" level of maturity (26%) are employing the most advanced tools and practices, Ventana says, and are knowledgeable about which business processes depend on which applications, networks and systems.
Organizations at the lower two maturity levels, "tactical" and "advanced" (each 21%) face more challenges when they attempt to manage IT performance. Ventana says tactical organizations lack the budget and resources for ITPM, and that advanced organizations lack executive support for implementing it.
To be successful with ITPM, the report says, it's necessary to monitor events in more than one system and to access data collected by multiple applications, networks and systems management tools. The research finds that in most organizations (61%), managers don't have an integrated view of IT asset performance, with (36%) acknowledging that there are conflicts in their data.
The research also shows that advances in IT effectiveness are being hindered by a lack of basic business intelligence capability for IT as well as a continued reliance on standalone files and spreadsheets to store and manage data and metrics for ITPM.
Despite significant investments in applications and systems, Ventana says, IT departments still suffer from inadequate management of processes and technology because they're not able to use information and metrics to accurately understand how IT is performing. IT organizations aren't prepared to respond effectively to the need to govern and improve IT operations - even though most organizations understand the importance of doing this, Ventana notes.
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