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How IT Can Score More Touchdowns

Matthew Selheimer

IT has come a long way over the last five to 10 years. Issues like password resets, fixing VPN connections, and even spinning up virtual machines in the cloud for software development projects have become routine, and IT staffs can handle them quickly and easily with minimal loss of productivity (and revenue) for the business.

In fact, about 82 percent of IT incidents are handled in the expected amount of time, according to Pink Elephant. That sounds pretty good, and in some ways it is. The problem is that the number hasn’t improved much in recent years. IT has gotten really good at the basics, but the other 18 percent of incidents continue to take much longer to fix, negatively impacting productivity and potentially holding back the business.

It’s Fall, so let’s think about it in football terms. If your favorite team were really good at driving 82 yards but then couldn’t score a touchdown, it wouldn’t win many games by settling for field goals. The best teams excel at scoring once they get into the red zone, the last 20 yards standing between them and seven more points on the board. Those final 18 yards – or for IT, that last 18 percent – are extremely important.

And those aforementioned statistics are just for incidents. It’s even worse when we look at change management. A study by Forrester found that change success rates are 60-79 percent for most organizations. Nineteen percent of those surveyed reported that 40 percent of their IT incidents were self-inflicted wounds caused by IT changes and a whopping 31 percent didn’t even know what percentage of incidents were caused by changes!

Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of organizations could not make a change to their infrastructure on a weekly basis. In a world where businesses have to be agile and stable, those facts are disastrous. It means IT is holding those businesses back and it means that the change problem has to be tackled to get IT in the end zone.

Why haven’t we seen more improvement with “red zone” IT? I think we can agree for the most part we have good, talented people working in IT. By and large, we have good processes too. And with few exceptions, we have good technology. The truth is we’ve been using the same approaches and solutions over and over again and expecting different results. I think there’s a famous quote about how that ends.

Rather than trying to address the people issue with more training (useful always but not the answer), the process issue with another version of ITIL (I’m not holding my breath) or the technology issue with more tool customization or automations, it’s time – past time, really – to consider a new approach that takes advantage of all the untapped knowledge among IT staff and helps them collaborate much more effectively.

Imagine a whole new IT world where tribal knowledge surfaces in the heat of the moment when it’s needed, team members are able to collaborate in real time and all assets can be visualized with their interdependencies clearly shown so you can see where the ripple effects of changes will go both upstream and downstream.

As revolutionary as these ideas may sound, they don’t require much change to what you’ve been doing in an ad hoc matter already. It means getting out of tools that are all about tickets and moving away from SharePoint “document dumps” and putting the ball back in the hands of your human talent so they can collaborate better together for that final 18 percent. You don’t need to fire your players or coaches and tear down the stadium. What you need is a new playbook that takes full advantage of your personnel’s knowledge about your environment and helps everyone work together to move the team forward on every drive.

Right team + right tools + right information = right red zone IT game plan, and that means a lot more touchdowns! Stop settling for IT field goals and get your team into the end zone.

Matthew Selheimer is Chief Technical Evangelist and SVP of Marketing at ITinvolve.

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How IT Can Score More Touchdowns

Matthew Selheimer

IT has come a long way over the last five to 10 years. Issues like password resets, fixing VPN connections, and even spinning up virtual machines in the cloud for software development projects have become routine, and IT staffs can handle them quickly and easily with minimal loss of productivity (and revenue) for the business.

In fact, about 82 percent of IT incidents are handled in the expected amount of time, according to Pink Elephant. That sounds pretty good, and in some ways it is. The problem is that the number hasn’t improved much in recent years. IT has gotten really good at the basics, but the other 18 percent of incidents continue to take much longer to fix, negatively impacting productivity and potentially holding back the business.

It’s Fall, so let’s think about it in football terms. If your favorite team were really good at driving 82 yards but then couldn’t score a touchdown, it wouldn’t win many games by settling for field goals. The best teams excel at scoring once they get into the red zone, the last 20 yards standing between them and seven more points on the board. Those final 18 yards – or for IT, that last 18 percent – are extremely important.

And those aforementioned statistics are just for incidents. It’s even worse when we look at change management. A study by Forrester found that change success rates are 60-79 percent for most organizations. Nineteen percent of those surveyed reported that 40 percent of their IT incidents were self-inflicted wounds caused by IT changes and a whopping 31 percent didn’t even know what percentage of incidents were caused by changes!

Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of organizations could not make a change to their infrastructure on a weekly basis. In a world where businesses have to be agile and stable, those facts are disastrous. It means IT is holding those businesses back and it means that the change problem has to be tackled to get IT in the end zone.

Why haven’t we seen more improvement with “red zone” IT? I think we can agree for the most part we have good, talented people working in IT. By and large, we have good processes too. And with few exceptions, we have good technology. The truth is we’ve been using the same approaches and solutions over and over again and expecting different results. I think there’s a famous quote about how that ends.

Rather than trying to address the people issue with more training (useful always but not the answer), the process issue with another version of ITIL (I’m not holding my breath) or the technology issue with more tool customization or automations, it’s time – past time, really – to consider a new approach that takes advantage of all the untapped knowledge among IT staff and helps them collaborate much more effectively.

Imagine a whole new IT world where tribal knowledge surfaces in the heat of the moment when it’s needed, team members are able to collaborate in real time and all assets can be visualized with their interdependencies clearly shown so you can see where the ripple effects of changes will go both upstream and downstream.

As revolutionary as these ideas may sound, they don’t require much change to what you’ve been doing in an ad hoc matter already. It means getting out of tools that are all about tickets and moving away from SharePoint “document dumps” and putting the ball back in the hands of your human talent so they can collaborate better together for that final 18 percent. You don’t need to fire your players or coaches and tear down the stadium. What you need is a new playbook that takes full advantage of your personnel’s knowledge about your environment and helps everyone work together to move the team forward on every drive.

Right team + right tools + right information = right red zone IT game plan, and that means a lot more touchdowns! Stop settling for IT field goals and get your team into the end zone.

Matthew Selheimer is Chief Technical Evangelist and SVP of Marketing at ITinvolve.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...