Why You Can't Keep Throwing More People at IT Issues

Vincent Geffray

With the increased complexity of IT environments, the rising cyber threats and the growing number of IT alerts, IT organizations have come to the realization that throwing more people at IT issues doesn't solve the problem. According to a recent DEJ study, putting more people on a particular IT issue is not an effective approach, so organizations are finding themselves at a turning point — and they have to take notice.


Respondents to the survey said that they experienced, on average, an 88 percent increase in processed metrics, events and alerts over the last 12 months. The study also found that 42 percent of organizations are reporting that the technology solutions they purchased in the past are not as effective when working with this level of volume and velocity of data.

What Do the Findings Tell Us?

Today, IT Organizations need to adapt quickly to new consumer behaviors which are driving increasingly growing business demands for IT services. And as the demand for digital services increases, so does the risk for service outages. Everyone in IT knows that major IT issues are unpredictable and unavoidable, and that 20th century tools and processes are no longer up for the task. Senior IT executives, along with business leaders, really need to rethink their IT strategy if they want to be able to fully embrace the future — made of big dta, AI and IoT.

Modern IT Stacks, Yet Operating with 1990's Processes

Engaging into digital transformation too late can severely hurt the business competitiveness

Every day we talk to IT leaders, we have conversations about the importance of modernizing their digital footprint so they can offer more — and faster. There is a consensus that customers' fast-changing expectations are the major driver behind digital transformation, and that engaging into digital transformation too late can severely hurt the business competitiveness. Discussions move quickly into Agile Development, Scrum team structures and DevOps, which is a good thing. It is now generally admitted that the old way of building IT services and applications (waterfall development) is no longer compatible with customers' high expectations of time to delivery and digital experience.

At the same time, there's a growing disconnect between the complexity of the new technology stack and tools organizations acquire, and the rudimentary processes they still use. This can quickly hurt both the effectiveness of the support functions, as well as the very ability of the organization to deliver new releases according to schedule.

Even in a perfect digital world, bad stuff will happen — retail websites slow down, they might not be available (DDoS, cyberattack), they might be experiencing a network outage, applications may fail, you may lose connection to your ERP, EMR, Supply Chain which impacts productivity and increases user frustration … in other words, the very same customers that you are trying to please with faster delivery may now be very frustrated with a poor quality of service when things break.

Faster Release Cycles Require Faster Response Cycles

IT leaders must review the three dimensions of their operations; their people, their processes and their technology.

Interestingly enough, the same DEJ study shows that IT Leaders have come to the conclusion that:

■ They cannot keep throwing more people to cope with the increasing number of IT issues

■ The investment they made in their ITSM platform, while necessary, is not sufficient any longer

■ Contextual information is critical when dealing with IT critical issues

■ Automation is no longer only used for tactical cost-cutting initiatives but that it is a must-have component to ensure consistent quality and delivery of IT services

Image removed.

What Now?

As organizations acquire new technology and adopt new digital service delivery methods, they must also inspect their processes and people assignments to ensure that their processes will:

■ Support their service delivery goals (frequency of release)

■ Enable the cross functional teams to collaborate and participate in

■ Meet their SLAs and protect business users experience when issues occur

■ Provide Senior IT Executives insight into their response team performance for continuous improvement

■ Give a way to perform post-mortem reviews using the metrics and information collected

■ Store full audit trails including conversation recording for compliance

Recommendations

IT leaders should turn to Closed-loop Response Management solutions, which help to automate the traditional, manual and time-consuming processes including:

■ Automatically gauge the severity and context of the event

■ Identify in real time the right teams and personnel based on who's on-call, location, skillset, etc.

■ Engage the right teams in real time, Escalate, Collaborate and Orchestrate

■ Gain visibility into Incident Response across all areas of IT: Service Operations, Security Operations, DevOps and IT BC/DR

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Why You Can't Keep Throwing More People at IT Issues

Vincent Geffray

With the increased complexity of IT environments, the rising cyber threats and the growing number of IT alerts, IT organizations have come to the realization that throwing more people at IT issues doesn't solve the problem. According to a recent DEJ study, putting more people on a particular IT issue is not an effective approach, so organizations are finding themselves at a turning point — and they have to take notice.


Respondents to the survey said that they experienced, on average, an 88 percent increase in processed metrics, events and alerts over the last 12 months. The study also found that 42 percent of organizations are reporting that the technology solutions they purchased in the past are not as effective when working with this level of volume and velocity of data.

What Do the Findings Tell Us?

Today, IT Organizations need to adapt quickly to new consumer behaviors which are driving increasingly growing business demands for IT services. And as the demand for digital services increases, so does the risk for service outages. Everyone in IT knows that major IT issues are unpredictable and unavoidable, and that 20th century tools and processes are no longer up for the task. Senior IT executives, along with business leaders, really need to rethink their IT strategy if they want to be able to fully embrace the future — made of big dta, AI and IoT.

Modern IT Stacks, Yet Operating with 1990's Processes

Engaging into digital transformation too late can severely hurt the business competitiveness

Every day we talk to IT leaders, we have conversations about the importance of modernizing their digital footprint so they can offer more — and faster. There is a consensus that customers' fast-changing expectations are the major driver behind digital transformation, and that engaging into digital transformation too late can severely hurt the business competitiveness. Discussions move quickly into Agile Development, Scrum team structures and DevOps, which is a good thing. It is now generally admitted that the old way of building IT services and applications (waterfall development) is no longer compatible with customers' high expectations of time to delivery and digital experience.

At the same time, there's a growing disconnect between the complexity of the new technology stack and tools organizations acquire, and the rudimentary processes they still use. This can quickly hurt both the effectiveness of the support functions, as well as the very ability of the organization to deliver new releases according to schedule.

Even in a perfect digital world, bad stuff will happen — retail websites slow down, they might not be available (DDoS, cyberattack), they might be experiencing a network outage, applications may fail, you may lose connection to your ERP, EMR, Supply Chain which impacts productivity and increases user frustration … in other words, the very same customers that you are trying to please with faster delivery may now be very frustrated with a poor quality of service when things break.

Faster Release Cycles Require Faster Response Cycles

IT leaders must review the three dimensions of their operations; their people, their processes and their technology.

Interestingly enough, the same DEJ study shows that IT Leaders have come to the conclusion that:

■ They cannot keep throwing more people to cope with the increasing number of IT issues

■ The investment they made in their ITSM platform, while necessary, is not sufficient any longer

■ Contextual information is critical when dealing with IT critical issues

■ Automation is no longer only used for tactical cost-cutting initiatives but that it is a must-have component to ensure consistent quality and delivery of IT services

Image removed.

What Now?

As organizations acquire new technology and adopt new digital service delivery methods, they must also inspect their processes and people assignments to ensure that their processes will:

■ Support their service delivery goals (frequency of release)

■ Enable the cross functional teams to collaborate and participate in

■ Meet their SLAs and protect business users experience when issues occur

■ Provide Senior IT Executives insight into their response team performance for continuous improvement

■ Give a way to perform post-mortem reviews using the metrics and information collected

■ Store full audit trails including conversation recording for compliance

Recommendations

IT leaders should turn to Closed-loop Response Management solutions, which help to automate the traditional, manual and time-consuming processes including:

■ Automatically gauge the severity and context of the event

■ Identify in real time the right teams and personnel based on who's on-call, location, skillset, etc.

■ Engage the right teams in real time, Escalate, Collaborate and Orchestrate

■ Gain visibility into Incident Response across all areas of IT: Service Operations, Security Operations, DevOps and IT BC/DR

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

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Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...