The deployment of change and configuration management controls is the single most important factor determining the performance of an IT department.

That is the conclusion of a recent study by research body the IT Process Institute (ITPI), which assessed the performance of almost 100 large IT departments and found that the top performers had the widest adoption of change and configuration management controls and systems.

The study looked at the deployment of Itil and Cobit best practices and found that while they broadly enhanced performance, it was the change-management controls they suggested that offered the greatest improvements "across a broad range of measures".

The deployment of change controls ensured that top-performing IT departments have a first-fix rate 56 percent better than low performers while also supporting five times more servers per system administrator, according to the report. The study follows similar research from Gartner that suggested 80 percent of system failures are due to internal IT changes rather than external events.

Jim Johnson, chief executive of change management software vendor Tripwire, one of several companies that commissioned the research, said the study would help IT chiefs to cherry pick best practice controls - such as enforcing IT " change windows" for administrators or only allowing authorised staff to make configuration changes - that are likely to deliver the best return on investment.

"Cobit gives you 300 different controls, but no IT shop will implement all those, nor do they need to," he added. "This research shows which are the most important and they tend to be around managing change and configuration."

Dan Schoenbaum, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Tripwire, said the company is launching a new consultancy service on the back of the research designed to assess customers' performance based on the ITPI report's benchmarks, and then recommend improvements that can be made based on the correlations between certain controls and improved performance that the report uncovered.

In separate news, the vendor also confirmed plans to launch a new version of its IT change management suite early next year. Tripwire Enterprise 6.0 will feature expanded support for new infrastructure and database technologies and improved business rules functionality for governing authorised and unauthorised system changes, the company said.