A recent study conducted on various sectors in the  IT solutions industry in the UK led to interesting results. It points out that an average business suffers roughly 235 hours of downtime every year. The reasons behind this are simple. Roughly 50 percent of the companies have incorporated a business model to validate the quality of their service and delivery. In contrast to the company's model, the executives admitted that they were not provided with the right level of operations management tools to manage their work. This is clean case of lack of investment and the main reason behind the increased downtime for a company.

Considering this situation, it is clearly derivable that resolving a fault in a package would be the priority for the business managers. 75 percent of these managers pointed out that the performance increase in checking the quality and reducing the faults was the most critical for increasing the productivity of the service provider. Other areas such as helpdesk and hardware managements also needed necessary improvements.

One of the main complaints of the executives is the lack of proper resources for effective management of the operations. A majority claims their major issues are with configuration management, while the remaining stick on to the cost controlling in operations management as the key reason.

The survey traces the problem to service level agreements (SLAs). They point out that one of the main problems being improper management of SLAs. Thirty three percent of the companies surveyed did not have any conventional SLAs in place and relied on the informal methodologies. Considering such a high scale of operations, it is hard to believe that there is not much transparency in the business model implemented.

One of the survey's key findings proclaims that less than 20 percent of the surveyed companies have adopted the IT Infrastructure Library framework and only 10 percent of the companies abided by the BS15000 standard.

Another important backlog faced by these companies included efficient communication with the team. Though about 20 % say that they have weekly meetings, the rest point out that they hardly meet. At the peak of the outsourcing boom, it would be a better decision to outsource all the different elements of operations management to a service provider whose business model corresponds to the existing SLAs. This reduces the effort of faulty management and increases the efficiency within a small team.

By not following the basic standards for an IT solutions provider and not keeping with service level agreements, there clearly is a high risk for these organisations. With technology being the heart and soul of every business, it’s high time for the directors to introspect and suitably manage their businesses effectively.