The Sun Certification and Team Performance: The Impact on System Administrators

Abstract

To maximize the value received from technology investments, IT managers must maximize their teams' skills in areas where performance is critical. The benefits include technical performance improvement, increased team productivity and performance, and greater return on technology investments. System administrators have a central role in ensuring that networks and systems are properly functioning and delivering the required level of value to the organizations. IDC found that more system administration service commitments were deployed on time with high concentrations of Sun-certified professionals. Learn how holding a Sun certification can impact your role as a system administrator.

Sample

IDC OPINION

CIOs and IT managers demand an integrated approach to business continuity, fault-resistant and high-availability architecture designs, a reduction in unplanned downtime, and vastly increased business agility that allows companies to better address emerging market opportunities quickly.

The speed of new technology introduction, compounded by ever-changing standards, has escalated the need for IT organizations to have a highly skilled and well-prepared workforce. Sufficient team skill associated with deploying, managing, and repairing a technology or solution maximizes the benefits organizations receive from their technologies, including fully leveraging embedded solution capabilities, reducing time to deploy solutions, and ensuring maximum functionality. IDC believes that better-skilled system administrators are more likely to deliver greater value from the systems they administer to meet business objectives.

Key findings from a global IDC research study of 75 IT teams responsible for system administration include:

Meaningful concentrations of certified system administrators increase the achievement of significant operational metrics, including efficient management of corporate servers, network and server availability, and meeting service commitments.
Improvement in team skill level, as measured by certifications, is directly correlated with increased organizational performance in key system administration metrics.
Teams with 50% of members certified on relevant Sun technologies and processes perform at the top tier of operational performance.
Every increase in certified staff improves performance in each metric reviewed.
Training, and ultimately certification, is critical to improving overall IT performance.

SITUATION OVERVIEW

Worldwide IT organizations spent about $77 billion on system software and tools in 2007. CIOs and IT managers are seeking an integrated approach to business continuity, fault-resistant and high-availability architecture designs, a reduction in unplanned downtime, and vastly increased business agility that allows their companies to better address emerging market opportunities quickly. They are challenged in this search by increasingly complex infrastructure environments that include increasingly complex IP-enabled network traffic; more pervasive, high-availability middleware; lights-out datacenter management; increased deployments of high-performance and scalable database workloads; and scale-up and scale-out deployments of networked computers.

At the same time, virtualization and "live migration" are being embraced by enterprises as useful and important elements of improving high availability for their complex environments. The implementation of live migration continues to improve and become more widely adopted so that workloads can be moved between resources, with no perceptible interruption for end users. Additionally, the current version of ITIL (ITIL v3) focuses on continuous improvement, which in turn is forcing a focus on improving the service delivered to an individual user.

These changes, and many more, make the datacenter more complex, heterogeneous, and more difficult to manage. The speed of these changes, compounded by ever-changing standards, has escalated the need for IT organizations to have a highly skilled and well-prepared workforce. Sufficient team skill associated with deploying, managing, and repairing a technology or solution maximizes the benefits organizations receive from their technologies, including fully leveraging embedded solution capabilities, reducing time to deploy solutions, and ensuring maximum functionality. To achieve value from their infrastructure investments, IT managers cautiously select the most appropriate technology, hire the most affordable and experienced consultants, and use sophisticated management practices to ensure functional success. IDC believes that the talent of the IT team is often overlooked as the critical element of IT organizational performance. Team skill dramatically impacts the value IT organizations get from their technology improvements.

Historically, there has been little research that attempts to describe the impact of certification on specific system administration metrics. Based on a global research study of 75 IT teams responsible for system administration, this white paper identifies several performance metrics for system administrators and compares the performance of teams with various concentrations of certifications.

The research revealed the strong link between certification, training, and organizational achievement of these system administration metrics. What is clear from this research is that well-trained teams perform demonstrably better than underskilled teams and that performance results in measurable improvement in productivity. Typically, teams that are well trained in best practices in system administration disciplines are more likely to meet deployment objectives and use efficient management practices than their less prepared counterparts.

Metrics Matter

IT managers drive performance based on examination of a number of key operating metrics. This white paper focuses on the performance of the system administration function, an area whose business value is directly correlated with training and certification.

Overview of Performance Metrics

In a recent study of 75 global IT teams, IDC assessed performance against key process metrics. These metrics were chosen based on prior IDC research wherein IT managers identified their key performance indicators.