“Major Incident Management Trends 2016,” the latest survey on the state of IT emergency response, also discovered that nearly two-thirds of IT departments have target resolution times when an outage occurs, but three-quarters of them routinely exceed their target times.

The report was conducted by Dimensional Research and commissioned by xMatters, inc., a leader in communications-based business processes, cited a lack of standard processes for the shortcomings.

It included a global survey of 400 companies to gain insight into how enterprises manage major incidents and where there is need for improvement.  One of the major findings was that 76% of business stakeholders accept that major incidents are an unavoidable fact of business, yet despite this, only 52% of companies have a major incident team and standard processes in place.

“Reliance on digital infrastructures has dramatically increased the impact and frequency of major incidents,” according to the report. “IT and business leaders within individual companies are mostly aligned on what constitutes major incidents and how to resolve them. However, standard definitions and processes are lacking between companies and across industries. Without these standards, IT departments lack benchmarks and best practices to help drive improvements.”

The survey found that nearly 60 percent of large organisations experience a major IT outage at least monthly.

“At long last, IT departments and business leaders are on the same page when it comes to recognising the severity of business impact during a major incident and the importance of solving disruptions as quickly as possible,” said David Gehringer, principal at Dimensional Research and author of the study. “However, they’re unfortunately falling far short of their goals of solving problems on time and in an efficient manner, often due to poor alerting and communications management.”

Dimensional Research’s “Business Impact of IT Incident Communications: A Global Survey of IT Professionals” survey from March showed improved IT alerting systems benefited the business, and 91 percent of the 300 surveyed said poor incident communication increased downtime. Eighty-seven percent indicated that guaranteed IT alert delivery would accelerate issue resolution, and 85 percent said issue resolution would be accelerated by a response system that initiates steps with a single click on a mobile device.

“The survey findings show both enterprise IT teams and business leaders have come to grips with the occurrence of major incidents and IT outages, but insist on effective communications. In terms of business stakeholder frustration, we found that lack of effective communication trumps occurrence of incidents in the first place,” said Randi Barshack, CMO of xMatters. “xMatters provides a modern intelligent communications and alerting technology that today’s market needs to be successful and quickly resolve critical IT and business disruptions.”

A free webinar on the survey is scheduled for Wednesday, December 16, at 11:00AM PT/2:00PM ET. To register for this free event, go to: https://info.xmatters.com/2015-MIMSurveyWebinar_LP.html.