IT Service Management - what’s blocking the UK’s improvement?

The research engaged 250 senior IT professionals from over 100 leading UK organisations. The sample focused on large organisations; 72% with over 1,000 employees and 30% with over 10,000 employees. The two largest vertical sectors were public sector (30%) and managed service providers (26%).

The survey replicated the industry standard for assessing service management maturity, COBIT 4.1 IT Governance Framework (designed to evaluate IT service maturity on a five point scale with respect to people, process, technology and business governance) and focused on identifying the challenges which are preventing improvements.

The higher the level of maturity, the higher the business value in terms of innovation and better efficiency. Ultimately, the maturity level underlines the value that IT delivers to organisation. At a time when 82% of CIOs number one priority is to enable new service delivery to support new business requirements, the need to remove improvement blocks has never been greater.

What were the results? Of the UK organisations surveyed, 12% rated themselves as level 1 (awareness); 48% level 2 (committed); 27% level 3 (proactive); 13% level 4 (service aligned); and no respondents rated themselves as operating at level 5 (business partner).

What’s stopping these organisations from improving and moving up the scale? The research clearly identified two primary challenges which are blocking service improvements in the next 12 months. 25% highlighted significant barriers to adopting new service functionality such as service catalogue and collaboration. A further 26%, the highest group in the research study, stated that their key challenge to improving performance is the introduction of a new service management product or significantly upgrading their current solution.

Tasos Symeonides, CEO of Axios Systems said, “These results are encouraging. While the majority of organisations are still at a low level of maturity, the fact that they recognise what challenges they need to overcome to move up the scale is positive. We look forward to working with UK organisations to help them move up the maturity scale over the coming months and years, by providing the tools to help them analyse trends and become more proactive, and also to help IT be seen as a service provider within the organisation. At the same time we will help these companies to move service management beyond IT to give greater value to the organisation as a whole.”