NEW YORK, March 12 /PRNewswire/ — OpTier(TM), the leader in Business Transaction Management(TM) for the enterprise, today announced the results of a survey of systems and applications managers conducted by OpTier and TechWeb Network Research. To view complete survey results, visit www.optier.com.
The recent survey shows that work anxiety is commonplace among IT managers, three-quarters of whom experience ongoing concerns about the performance of the IT applications they manage. Many show signs of workplace stress, with two-thirds reporting they are kept awake at night by application performance concerns. One-quarter of respondents reported a wide variety of physical symptoms, including nausea, ulcers, headaches, migraines, weight gain, nightmares, muscular twitches, stress-induced heart arrhythmia, panic attacks and even one near-death experience.
Said Motti Tal, executive vice president of marketing and business development for OpTier, “The typical IT manager addresses ongoing performance challenges without the end-to-end visibility and control needed to keep their infrastructure running smoothly and effectively. As a result, they’re experiencing the classic symptoms of workplace stress. Theirs is a daunting task … they truly are the unsung heroes of the organization.”
The underlying causes of stress include the complexity of the IT infrastructure and poorly defined goals. Survey respondents face complex challenges, with poor application performance caused by a combination of infrastructure, applications and middleware issues.
When resolving performance problems, IT managers faced several challenges. Forty-three percent of respondents reported that business priorities have not been explicitly aligned with IT. Other factors include challenges collaborating with other departments (39 percent), service level requirements not clear (35 percent) and lack of visibility into IT transactions (32 percent). Twenty-one percent cited all these factors.
While IT managers wrestle with performance management, their job is highly visible to the rest of the organization. Over half of the respondents receive up to 20 calls or emails about a single service outage. Another 18 percent said they received more than 50 calls or emails for a single outage. The operations department reports the most performance issues.
“To succeed in this type of job, you need to be a highly resilient personality who can respond to unexpected challenges without letting them get to you,” said Dr. Terry A. Beehr, professor of psychology at Central Michigan University. “This is a classic high-stress job, with low levels of control but high expectations from the organization.”
IT managers deal with continual disruptions to their personal lives. Respondents reported being called away from anniversaries, birthdays, holiday celebrations, movies, church services, funerals, classes, kids’ sports games, exercise, family leisure time, family illness and surgery. One respondent even got a call in the hospital after a car wreck. Said the respondent, “They were mad they had to wait for me to get out of the MRI!”
About OpTier
OpTier(TM) provides software solutions that dynamically link business services to underlying IT infrastructure, assuring service delivery and optimizing IT resources. Its unique Business Transaction Management(TM) technology — which delivers end-to-end visibility and control of all business transactions — makes effective Business Service Management a reality. OpTier tracks and monitors all business transactions — across all tiers, all the time. It identifies and isolates performance problems as they develop, thus minimizing the cost to resolve them. OpTier generates intelligence, for more effective testing, capacity planning, provisioning and decision-making. It can further prioritize transaction resource allocation based on business needs. For more information, visit www.optier.com.