Tim Smith writes in his newsletter:

In a recent report, Giga Information Group's Jean-Pierre Garbani applied Pareto to the infrastructure management industry, noting, "80 percent of the management software available solves only 20 percent of the service failures."

The root of much of today?s IT infrastructure hurdles lie, he says, in the "feudal" nature of existing IT organizations. Such management "promotes parochial and protective attitudes."

According to Garbani's research, "50 percent of service disruptions are reported by end users," not by the management products designed to identify and alert upon such disruptions. He cites two key factors for this:

• An alerting protocol "which has nothing to do with service and everything to do with device status," and
• Use of statistical correlation to identify cross-domain problems. Such correlation Garbani calls "utter nonsense: In the absence of causality (the relation between cause and effect), correlation is a dangerous and deceptive tool and can never be used as a way to identify the root cause of a problem."

Interesting observations,  however it isn't clear to me how this applies to the Pareto principle. 80/20 rule, possibly yes, but its relation to the Pareto principle, well that's stretching it a bit!

Disclaimer: I haven't read the Giga report.