“One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop,” a man named G. Weilacher once said. According to our research on the effectiveness of IT performance management best practices, Mr. Weilacher is spot on by concluding that a modest collection of tools can get a job done well. We have documented our findings in a free report that you can download here.
In the case of performance management, tools from four vendors are sufficient to get the job done as efficiently as possible. Our findings show that after a critical point reached at four vendors, adding more tool vendors does not significantly improve your ability to find and resolve performance problems. Beyond what we call the “point of efficiency”, results do not warrant adding more tool vendors.
Problem Resolution Effectiveness per Vendor Count
Our research also shows that insufficient manpower is the primary barrier to improving IT performance. In most IT organizations too few employees have too much on their plates, and improving employee efficiency is like adding staff. Optimizing the number of tools IT staff must master improves efficiency, and it also addresses another barrier to improving IT performance–insufficient cross-group collaboration. Using an optimal number of performance management tool vendors facilitates cross-group collaboration because groups can more easily share data.
Based on our research, we recommend selecting a cadre of four performance management vendors, each providing a key subset of integrated and automated tools. This will enable your staff to coax the best performance from your IT infrastructure and the applications that run on that infrastructure, and to do so most efficiently and inexpensively.
We have four recommendations for performance management tool vendor selection:
- Optimize the number of performance vendors to four.
- Select tools that easily integrate with one another.
- Choose tools that are automated.
- Ensure your tool set includes an extensive knowledge base.
In the end it is freeing up manpower that matters most. An optimal number of four integrated and automated tools with an excellent performance management knowledge base enables a smaller IT staff to support more users. This frees up staff from firefighting and incident management to devote more time to planning and proactively preventing problems.
Your staff can concentrate on activities like upgrades, rolling out new IT capabilities, shoring up frail infrastructure, and ensuring capacity meets demand. These types of activities further improve performance management effectiveness and contribute to the ongoing business success.
Let us know whether our findings jive with your experience.
Download the Report.
