When CIOs Have a Failure to Communicate

CIOs know all too well that if something can go wrong, chances are it will.

As more businesses rely on uninterrupted connectivity and adopt an always-on digital philosophy, the pressures CIOs face have grown as well.

A survey from Everbridge, titled “Current Trends and Concerns in IT Communication,” reveals that a number of concerns such as hardware failure, app outages, data center outages and performance issues continue to plague IT.

And these concerns can prove costly in many ways, with consequences such as added stress, customer dissatisfaction and lost business. To address the issues, organizations must take a more proactive approach toward the detection, prevention and resolution of these problems. The vast majority of companies still rely on manual phone calls to notify IT when something is wrong, and a number of them still simply wait for customers or users to complain before notifying the tech department about an issue. It should come as no surprise that few organizations are fully satisfied with their notification and activation process for incident response.

The most common types of IT incidents, according to survey respondents, are:

*Hardware failure: 55%

*Individual application outage: 54%

*Data center network outage: 52%

*Lost connectivity among sites or regional offices: 50%

*Data center network performance issues: 39%

More than 200 individuals responsible for IT operations took part in the research.

The survey also revealed that 34 percent said it’s challenging to find the right on-call person when an issue surfaces, and 93 percent said there are times when the person or team assigned to an incident does not respond.

CIOs have a responsibility to ensure that IT incident communication is a fluid process that resolves problems in the most efficient way possible. There’s been plenty of conjecture on why CIOs need to step up their visibility in the C-suite and get more hands-on with business strategy, but they must first be sure someone is there to answer a call when a tech issue is either preventing a worker from completing a task or a customer from completing a purchase.

Patrick K. Burke is senior editor of CIO Insight.