"It's not more staff that's needed," Marquis concludes. "Existing staff must become more productive."

Marquis concedes that larger companies most often have teams that support specific IT technologies (such as operating systems, networking and database management). Mid-market IT organizations, however, usually have a "more generalist approach with a shared team and few if any specialists," Marquis writes. "These teams work harder and have less time to dedicate to any particular technology or specialization."

But mid-market IT managers don't do themselves any favors in helping this area, Marquis states, citing research that found that fewer than 20 percent of IT organizations manage their "human capital" (for example, investing in training and new skills for staff) or actively measure worker performance. In turn, this lack of staff improvement contributes to a turnover rate that can exceed 27 percent per year, "making the workplace even more chaotic and reactive," he writes.

Marquis's company, EMA, offers consulting services for helping mid-market companies improve IT management of business processes, so it's not surprising that he sees this as a solution for mid-market IT shops. But what he often hears from IT staffers is a "we don't need no stinkin' process because we're IT pros" mentality, Marquis says in an interview. "And all that adds to horrendous efficiency."

And Marquis writes that inefficiency will hurt both businesses and mid-market IT shops. "IT is too busy to adopt huge [process-oriented] frameworks like ITIL, Six Sigma, CobiT or formal IT project management," Marquis writes. "But the reason they are so busy is precisely because they have no formal processes."

In sum, Marquis concludes that the "average IT organization is its own worst customer and responsible for most of the outages to which it finds itself reacting," he writes. "In fact, most of the work going on in the average IT organization is not productive work at all, but rather is re-work."