Software distribution success issues lead to client health thoughts
Summary: my recent posting on "defining client health" was inspired by various conversations I've seen or had recently along the lines of 'how successful are you?' Rod Trent has posted a couple of surveys to that effect that really help to visuallize the points made in those discussions. For me, they lead to thoughts on client health (of course ;-)
Rod's results so far are:
Those polls (with the latest results) can be found at the following URLs. If you haven't entered your success rate, I encourage you to do so.
http://www.myitforum.com/absolutepm/polls/smssoftwarepoll.asp
http://www.myitforum.com/absolutepm/polls/sccmsoftwarerates.asp
The poll results raise some obvious questions:
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how big are the sample sets? (how many people have entered their data) - small sample sets have a larger risk of being unrepresentative
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what kind of organizations do they work for? (big, small, new, experienced, etc.) - this typically impacts how much time they can afford to spend to clarify details, and how many complexities they face
- did everyone filter out offline clients, obsolete clients, etc? (which obviously can't receive software distributions)
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how long do they allow for the success rates to be achieved (or do they factor time into the calculation)? There are good reason why success rates are low in the short run and better in the long run
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what do they mean by "success rate"? (I suspect there's a few different definitions - including or excluding package issues, offline clients, operational issues, etc.)
- are they satisfied with their sucess rates? - is 95% always bad?
Those are pretty serious variables for any data set, so it's hard to draw conclusions. But the results are reasonably consistent (the polls were done in different months), and given the percentage fractions, size of the myITforum community, and typical poll return rates, I suspect we're seeing the results from dozens of organizations. So it's not unfair to draw some conclusions.
My conclusions:
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a fairly high fraction of administrators aren't satisfied with their software distribution success rates - maybe one half
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my assumption is that half of those below 97% success are unhappy with their succes rates, and we can see two thirds are below 97%
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some of those with 97% or a little better are also unhappy
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that's based on the assumption that IT administrators and managers generally like success rates like 99%, 99.9%, or even 99.99%. 98% might be understandable. Below 98% would often be frustrating. Of course they're often comparing apples to oranges (data center server uptimes to user computer software distributions, for example). But IT people believe the world is very deterministic and quantifiable
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client health, in the broadest sense, is a factor for some people - maybe one quarter
But there are some conclusions we can't make (though we might like to):
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are bigger organizations more sensitive to client health issues than smaller ones are?
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is anyone willing to invest in their client health strategy (and thus their software distribution success rates)?
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is the current software distribution and client health guidance (documentation, reports, etc.) sufficient for people's needs? (i.e. are they satisfied with their understanding of the success rates they're seeing?)
That's where your comments come in. Anecodotal evidence isn't the best, but if we hear more or less the same story over and over, conclusions can be made. So make some noise! Clarify the story.
p.s. I don't have any data for products other than SMS or ConfigMgr, but I don't see any reason why other systems wouldn't see similar success rates. The problem is not that SMS and ConfigMgr are hard, but rather that computer management is hard. It's the nature of the beast.