IT Performance Strongly Affects the Bottom Line, Survey Finds

If you're an IT executive, stand tall - you're more important than you (and others) may give yourself credit for. According to the partial results of a survey of 220 senior executives and IT managers released today, IT performance is absolutely critical to overall revenue. The study, which was commissioned by business service management software vendor Managed Objects, found that 66% of senior executives think IT systems are so important that "we can't earn our revenue at all without them running properly" and an additional 27% feel that revenue would slow significantly if key systems weren't accessible (another 6% said productivity would be reduced by IT problems).That said, IT and business executives share a realistic view of IT uptime. Among all respondents, 40% think it's very or somewhat likely that some systems will go down for a few hours this year without being noticed. A whopping 97% of executives at large companies (more than $1 billion in revenue) expect at least a few hours of downtime in 2007, and 46% expect those outages to be significant enough to be consequential to their revenue. So while you're important, you're not expected to be perfect. However, if IT outages can be tied to revenue shortfalls, you may wish you weren't so important, after all.

The full report will be released in a few weeks.