The rise of saas (Software as a Service) as a viable ITSM tool is one of the many findings from our 6th Annual IT Service Management Industry Survey.
This article summarizes some of the key findings from this year's survey. A link to the full set of results, as well as to a recorded webinar discussing the results, can be found at the end of this article.
Starting in 2005 Consulting-Portal has been conducting an annual survey of ITSM practitioners to help get a sense of the maturity of ITSM programs across North America and beyond.
This years survey was conducted between January 13, 2010 and March 9, 2011. It consisted of 36 questions that covered the following categories:
- Organizing for IT Service Management
- IT Service Management Processes
- IT Service Management Governance
- IT Service Management Tools
- Training and Certification
There were 158 participants in this year's survey of which 45% were managers, 36% were ITSM practitioners and 19% were executive management.
Twenty-five percent of the responses came from Financial Services organizations, 12% came from IT Service Providers while the remaining were distributed between the Government, Education, Healthcare, Entertainment, Energy and a handful of other sectors.
Eighty-seven percent of the participants were from North America with the remainder distributed between India, the UK, Switzerland, Russia, the Netherlands and Spain.
Some of the notable findings in this years survey include:
- Executive management support for ITSM continues to grow.
This year 69% of the respondents report VP or higher support for their ITSM programs. That is up from 56% last year and even more from previous years.
We also found that 60% of the respondents report that they have a dedicated ITSM organization with full-time resources.
- ITIL V3 is the preferred IT process framework.
Our survey showed that 80% of respondents use ITIL v3 as their process framework. That is up from 60% in last year's survey. Ninety-three percent of the participants are using ITIL and 7% use other frameworks.
Even though most are using ITIL v3 (which prescribes a lifecycle model of Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and CSI) the majority of organizations are still focused on a relatively small set of processes consisting of Incident, Problem, Change, Service Request and Configuration Management.
- Governance for ITSM remains very weak.
Based on the survey results only 26% of the respondents have implemented and enforced ITSM governance. This has remained consistently low over all of our six surveys. Without governance, all the hard work you put into designing and implementing processes can go to waste, making it hard to communicate ROI to your executive sponsors.
We also found that only 22% of the participants have "actionable" metrics - meaning they actually do something to improve the processes based on objective evidence.
- Acceptance of saas for ITSM continues to grow.
Sixty-six percent of our survey participants reported that their companies are either using software as a service for ITSM or are evaluating its use. That is up from 33.4% last year and virtually nobody in 2009.
We also found that 31% or respondents have implemented a CMDB and 38% are planning to in 2011. In support of CMDB we found that 66% of respondents have, or are planning on, implementing "Auto Discovery Tools".
- Certification is very important to ITSM practitioners.
Only 4% of all respondents have no form of ITIL certification. Forty-nine percent of the respondents are "Foundations" certified, 20% are taking Intermediate ITIL training and 27% have either a Service Manager or ITIL v3 Expert designation.
Fifty-two percent of the organizations surveyed have a formal ITSM training program and 49% of those have their own internal ITIL trainers.
These are just of few of thefindings.
To download a copy of the complete results, or to view our recorded webinar in which we discussed the results, please go to the 6th Annual ITSM Industry Survey Webinar.
About the author
David Mainville is the CEO and Co-founder of Consulting-Portal, the company behind http://www.ITOptimizer.com - a toolkit to Assess, Design and Govern your processes.David has over 30 years of IT Service Management experience gained as a Mainframe Field Engineer, Systems Management Architect, ITSM Consultant and Director of ITSM consulting.