Partners in IT, a United-Kingdom-based service management company, recently reported, after a study, that business managers in the UK lose 31 working days - more than 10 percent of the year - putting out fires that result from bad management of IT systems. I learned of this from an article in eWeek Careers.
Almost 75 percent of non-IT business managers surveyed said they spent, on average, 12 percent of their time each week dealing with problems caused by their IT systems. Eighty percent said that IT system downtime was a productivity issue, and 90 percent of survey respondents in large companies said downtime was a big issue.
Paul Cash, managing director of Partners in IT, said "globalization of successful businesses coupled with more flexible and mobile work forces have driven innovation within even the largest of companies. Technology has played its part in helping to drive this innovation but, just as any other resource in an organization, technology needs to be maintained and managed - it needs time devoted to it to ensure that the most benefit is gained."
Do fragmentation problems cause all the 31 lost working days? Surely not. But I would bet that a great deal of down time, help desk calls, general frustration and more is the result of fragmentation problems. That's why, despite its lack of visibility in the press, many forward-thinking companies and companies that pay great attention to optimal performance and user productivity, deploy enterprise defragmentation software. They know that without it, there can be decreased end-user productivity, wasted system admin and help desk resources, increased backup times, hanging applications, and in extreme cases, even worse.
I agree with most of what Cash says, although I would say that with a product like PerfectDisk, you can gain a lot with very minimal time devoted.
If you're an IT professional drowning in fire-fighting, free up some of your time with enterprise deframentation. Or be the forward-thinking person and help reduce fire-fighting with defragmentation so you and your organization can spend more time on strategic initiatives.
It's a good move for your company -- and for you.
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