IT Directors Unimpressed By Service Provider Quality

With all the hype around cloud computing at the moment, systems integrators and third-party IT service providers will find a new survey out today uncomfortable reading.

IT directors rated third-party IT service provider performance in IT consulting projects over the past three years 4.9 out of a possible score of 10.

Lack of process governance

Software development services fared only slightly better, with a mean score of 5.1, followed by 5.9 for software services management.

“I was surprised by the fact that IT directors saw project management from service providers as strong, yet saw the provision of robust services as weak,” said Peter Tubb, sales and operations vice president for professional service delivery software maker, eTask, which commissioned the survey.

When asked if they had been particularly satisfied or particularly disappointed, IT director scores ranged from 68 percent particularly disappointed for robust processes and 65% for remote access through to 68 percent who were particularly satisfied with project management and 63 percent with technological capability.

He said the findings showed IT directors made a clear distinction between the quality of providers’ project management expertise and the actual governance and delivery processes used during an IT consulting project.

Some smaller integrators, outsourcers or professional IT services firms were still even using spreadsheets to track service delivery, he added.

Alex Wright, researcher at Winmark, which carried out the research among 40 IT directors and service providers, agreed that the survey results were very worrying.

“In the services industry we would typically expect figures to be at about 8 out of 10,” he said. “To be around, or even lower, than the 5 mark suggests that IT services providers have got a long way to go to deliver the value that IT directors are looking for.”

Remote access and integration with existing systems saw 61 percent particularly disappointed, when 40 percent of IT directors saw the cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) as “an inevitable future of office technology”. This disparity should, Tubb added, provide service providers with a particularly loud wake-up call.

He said service providers lacked the tools to coordinate project management and delivery resources and facilitate collaboration, in support strong governance processes.

As a start-up, he said eTask’s focus was on “service delivery and governance systems around it”. “If you think about what Salesforce.com is to CRM [customer relationship management], we want to be the same to professional services delivery.”