Compuware: Tech Failures Plague Global Businesses, Costing Billions
DETROIT (WWJ) -- Global businesses of all sizes face pervasive technology failures, with more than half registering a significant technology failure within the past year and 81 percent indicating they had the same fiasco occur multiple times, a Compuware Corporation (Nasdaq:CPWR) survey found.
The survey by Intellitrends also revealed that most organizations are unable to measure and quantify the business impact of their poorly performing technology.
Of the more than 300 global executives surveyed:
• Forty-eight percent said they experience tech-performance issues daily.
• Three of four reported that the frequency of failures is increasing or staying the same.
• Fifty-one percent have recorded a major tech failure within the past 4-12 months.
• Four of five (81%) indicated the same major tech failure has occurred multiple times.
• Only one-third regularly collects data and quantifies the impact of failures.
"At a time when technology permeates the operational fabric of every business, technology performance becomes a key competitive differentiator," said Compuware CEO Bob Paul. "Properly functioning technology can lead to expanded market shares, improved margins and increased revenues. Corporate leaders must understand the impact of technology on their businesses and take technology performance as seriously as they take other business-critical areas of their operations."
Added Bharath Gowda, Compuware director of technology performance services: "Employing a performance-management discipline where performance data gets collected regularly, measured and analyzed, is a good place to start. You need to be able to identify, measure, and understand performance issues before you can truly fix them."
The survey identified three primary reasons for the general lack of performance measurement and impact analysis:
* Failure to grasp the root cause of performance issues and, consequently, a reduced ability to resolve them conclusively.
* Failure to grasp the severity of the business impact of performance issues, leading often to an ineffective response through improper resource allocation.
* Lack of alignment and inconsistent perceptions of severity and the time needed to resolve an IT issue, triggering friction between IT and the business.
The survey also found that many IT performance issues are "fixed" with short-term patches. Most resolution attempts fall into reactive categories like purchasing or upgrading software and hardware, increasing IT training, boosting IT staffing or hiring an IT consulting firm.
"The key to maximizing technology performance involves employing a proactive, or even predictive, performance-management approach that comprises focused expertise, comprehensive process and expert systems," Gowda said. "In the absence of such a strategy, reactive measures like software patches, hardware upgrades and supplemented staffing are little more than Band-Aids. Over the long run, they prove to be extremely costly and largely ineffectual."
The "Measuring the Impact of Technology Performance" study was conducted for Compuware by Intellitrends during February and March and surveyed 304 corporate executives and senior managers from companies in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia. Of the 304 participants, 250 were in line-of-business and 54 were IT. Participant companies represent retail, manufacturing, finance, health care and pharmaceuticals.
Visit www.compuware.com/techfail for the complete study and related assets.
