IT directors give thumbs-down to service providers

IT directors are far from happy with the service they receive from their third party IT service providers. That’s one of the main conclusions to be drawn from a survey eTask Technologies carried out by research company Winmark.

IT directors scored their service providers less than five out of 10 when asked the question: “In general in the last three years, how would you rate your third party IT service providers in IT consulting projects?”

The mean score of 4.9 was only just lower than the 5.1 mean score for software development provision and the slightly healthier 5.9 for software services management.
Worrying
“These figures are very worrying,” says Alex Wright, researcher at Winmark: “In the services industry we would typically expect figures to be at about eight out of 10. To be around, or even lower, than the five mark suggests that IT services providers have got a long way to go to deliver the value that IT directors are looking for.”

IT directors also commented on “internal issues with the service provider” and that “there was a failure to keep us informed at an early stage” while another expressed annoyance that “they were not geared up to the needs of my business.”

However, third party suppliers also have their issues with IT directors. One area picked up by Wright was the poor scoring for strategic direction: “Sixty per cent of service providers scored seven or less when asked about the quality of strategic direction. If you consider that any score below seven out of 10 translates pretty much to ‘ok’ at best then this would suggest that IT directors still have a long way to go before they are seen as strategic in the way that many of them would like.”
Communication
Communication was another critical area with service providers making comments like: “they know what they want but it’s hard to get hold of them and get them to move things forward “and that “they haven’t really understood what they really wanted to achieve from the project.”

The survey also looked at current perceptions of SaaS delivered through the cloud. 40 percent of IT directors saw SaaS as “an inevitable future of office technology” while an even greater percentage of service providers (80 percent) were also very positive about the ability of SaaS to deliver.