The IT “Firefighters” Keep Us Alive
This week’s CIO Insight article “IT Spends Too Much Time on ‘Firehouse Duty’” paints IT professionals as nearly comically ineffective. Well, they’re not.
The piece starts with:
It sounds somewhat like a bad IT joke that you’d hear in the office: “How many tech professionals does it take to fix an issue?” The answer is five, working a combined average of 100 hours of time that otherwise would be devoted toward pursuing business-benefitting goals.
Urgh…Here’s what gets to me about this: Since when is fixing things that break not contributing to the business’ bottom line? How about we leave it broken and see how the bottom line does then?
Do we expect an electrician to install a piece of manufacturing equipment and never have to attend to it and have it run perfectly? No, of course not. Tuning, maintenance, and, yes, fire-fighting repair, are part of the IT professional’s work.
Systems will always have problems. Remember how we rate hard drives? MTB: “mean time between failures.” In other words, we expect failures. It’s just a matter of time. That’s systems, period. Keeping them working keeps the business working. That is a massive business benefit.
The article’s message bugged me a bit so I reached out to TeamQuest, the IT Service Optimization Software company that sponsored the study. They were great and were kind enough to provide us with the hard data. Here’s what we found.
- The article makes it sound like each “unexpected issue” consumes 100 hours. The raw data says that nearly 70% of problems are resolved in under 60 minutes. (Note to self: Be careful crunching the numbers!)
- The article points out that 20% of respondents had 20 or more “unexpected IT issues” in a week. OK, but that means that 80% did NOT. So you tell me, on balance, which is the more important statistic?
I could go on, but you get the point.
Now I know the way the world works, and I get that TeamQuest wants to make the point that more proactive maintenance reduces the number of fire alarms. Fair enough. Proactive maintenance is a wonderful thing. I fully support it.
But let’s not for a minute forget that we rely on the firefighters to put out fires. Some, indeed, avoidable through more proactive maintenance management, some not. Either way, when my system blows up, I want a great firefighter to show up and save the day. And so do our stakeholders.
