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The New Role of IT: Promoting Employee Collaboration and Productivity

Pre-pandemic, only 16% of IT decision makers would say IT was largely responsible for the workplace. But in the next five years, 45% expect their departments to be largely responsible, according to a new research report, IT in the Evolving Workplace, from Nexthink.


The report highlights that 94% of IT professionals are seeing the roles and responsibilities of their job moving away from simply provisioning IT equipment to focus more on providing solutions which promote employee collaboration and productivity.

90% have received additional training from their organization to support them in their role's evolution since the shift to remote work in the beginning of 2020, and 95% have received access to additional tools or software.

"Hybrid or remote working has cast enterprise IT into the role of supporting digital work experiences and even influencing the side effects of remote work, including isolation, disengagement and lack of energy" said Yassine Zaied, Chief Strategy Officer for Nexthink. "As a result, IT's role is changing from a problem fixer to an architect of the workplace. While this shift was accelerated due to the necessary remote work caused by the pandemic, the data shows us IT has been heading in this direction for years. We're on the cusp of a new era for how enterprises consider digital work and who supports it."

Additional highlights from the report on the shifting roles and responsibilities of IT include:

IT's evolving role

IT's role has been evolving for years — 99% of respondents have seen new tasks come into their role in the past five years, including developing working from home practices and training, supporting employee communication and developing sustainability projects and policies.

More recognition for IT

Despite changes, IT professionals are looking for more recognition in their new roles — 99% report that there are things that they could have or do which would help them excel as an IT professional in a remote/hybrid working world — more than half (57%) would like recognition of their roles and responsibilities, followed by additional tools/software (55%), better leadership/guidance (53%) and additional time for certain tasks (47%).

HR under IT

Traditionally HR areas are coming under the purview of IT. While 63% of IT professionals consider access to effective and appropriate technology to be largely the IT department's responsibility, notable proportions also consider IT to be responsible in other more traditionally HR-focused areas. For example, 29% believe that IT are largely responsible for effective employee collaboration and 27% believe they are largely responsible for employee productivity.

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

The New Role of IT: Promoting Employee Collaboration and Productivity

Pre-pandemic, only 16% of IT decision makers would say IT was largely responsible for the workplace. But in the next five years, 45% expect their departments to be largely responsible, according to a new research report, IT in the Evolving Workplace, from Nexthink.


The report highlights that 94% of IT professionals are seeing the roles and responsibilities of their job moving away from simply provisioning IT equipment to focus more on providing solutions which promote employee collaboration and productivity.

90% have received additional training from their organization to support them in their role's evolution since the shift to remote work in the beginning of 2020, and 95% have received access to additional tools or software.

"Hybrid or remote working has cast enterprise IT into the role of supporting digital work experiences and even influencing the side effects of remote work, including isolation, disengagement and lack of energy" said Yassine Zaied, Chief Strategy Officer for Nexthink. "As a result, IT's role is changing from a problem fixer to an architect of the workplace. While this shift was accelerated due to the necessary remote work caused by the pandemic, the data shows us IT has been heading in this direction for years. We're on the cusp of a new era for how enterprises consider digital work and who supports it."

Additional highlights from the report on the shifting roles and responsibilities of IT include:

IT's evolving role

IT's role has been evolving for years — 99% of respondents have seen new tasks come into their role in the past five years, including developing working from home practices and training, supporting employee communication and developing sustainability projects and policies.

More recognition for IT

Despite changes, IT professionals are looking for more recognition in their new roles — 99% report that there are things that they could have or do which would help them excel as an IT professional in a remote/hybrid working world — more than half (57%) would like recognition of their roles and responsibilities, followed by additional tools/software (55%), better leadership/guidance (53%) and additional time for certain tasks (47%).

HR under IT

Traditionally HR areas are coming under the purview of IT. While 63% of IT professionals consider access to effective and appropriate technology to be largely the IT department's responsibility, notable proportions also consider IT to be responsible in other more traditionally HR-focused areas. For example, 29% believe that IT are largely responsible for effective employee collaboration and 27% believe they are largely responsible for employee productivity.

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...