* Who do you work with to troubleshoot IT problems?
In the last couple of WAN newsletters, we used the results from a recent Webtorials survey to show how IT organizations have made some progress in aligning themselves with the company’s business units. We also showed that these same organizations have not done a good job of aligning the infrastructure organization with the applications group, nor have they done a good job of implementing processes to plan and fund IT initiatives holistically across all of the components of IT.
Today, we are going to explore the degree to which IT organizations troubleshoot an issue holistically. With that in mind, we asked the 149 IT professionals who responded to the survey to indicate their agreement with the statement: “Troubleshooting a network operational issue occurs cooperatively across all network disciplines.” Seventeen percent of the respondents strongly agreed with that statement. Interesting, only 12% of the people whose full-time job involves troubleshooting strongly agreed with that statement.
We also asked the survey respondents to indicate their agreement with the statement: “Troubleshooting an IT operational issue occurs cooperatively across all IT disciplines.” Twelve percent of the respondents strongly agreed with that statement. However, only 7% of the people whose full-time job involves troubleshooting strongly agreed with that statement.
We conclude that companies troubleshoot holistically only slightly more often than they plan and fund holistically. We also conclude that once a troubleshooting issue has been escalated, the chance of it being worked cooperatively across multiple disciplines increases somewhat. However, cooperative troubleshooting of an operational issue is still very much the exception, particularly when it involves all IT disciplines.
