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Why a Critical Shift to Your IT Department Could Save the Whole Company

Rex McMillan

Too much to do. Not enough people to do it.

That's the challenge facing a wide range of departments across nearly every conceivable industry. The tight labor market is enough of a headache on its own, but right now it's happening at the same time as an unprecedented digital transformation. The rapid acceleration of digital transformation meant companies around the world performed an electrical tape transformation; that is to say they did it as fast as possible with a slew of not-so-pretty temporary fixes and crossed their fingers that it would hold until they could take the time to make thorough, permanent updates.

Now that it's high time to make those permanent updates, their IT departments are overtaxed and tapped out. A new survey of IT professionals reveals just how tough things are — and gives a glimpse into what's at stake if we don't rally behind IT.

The Numbers Don't Lie

72%. That's the number of respondents who reported losing IT team members recently. And that astronomical turnover isn't simply because there wasn't a nice holiday bonus or enough vacation. The #1 reason for attrition: a high workload.

Companies know how important their IT departments are, especially now — with 61% of respondents affirming that IT is critical to an organization's growth and business strategy.

And yet, nearly one-third (32%) of respondents cited "lack of executive support" as another reason for leaving, along with "unrealistic expectations placed on the team."

Translation: Companies know they need IT. They're ramping up IT workload. But they aren't giving IT the right support. The result is being felt across the enterprise, with "keeping up with digital transformation" (32%) and "keeping talent in technical roles" (26%) cited as the two biggest challenges organizations face today. With technology more important than ever, companies can't afford to compromise in this key area. Letting IT fall apart means putting the entire company at risk.

Onward and Upward

How can companies give IT more support when demand is high and resources are spread too thin?

One clear pathway to relieving the strain on IT is to adopt automation. Two-thirds of decision-makers reported that the pandemic led them to accelerate plans for, or increase adoption of, automated IT service offerings. Still, only one percent of those decision-makers have actually completed their adoption of automated services, according to the survey.

That leaves 99% of IT teams at risk of being overtaxed and under-supported. The shift to automation means a lift up front, but the payoff is significant. The majority (55%) of survey respondents reported that automating IT processes saved the IT department between one and eight hours per service request. Not overall, not per week — per individual request. For organizations with more than 50% of their IT services automated, that number jumps to more than 16 hours. If these numbers hold true for your organization, you could automate just three service requests in a week and eliminate the equivalent of six days of full-time effort from an employee.

Think automation diminishes the value of your IT team?

Hardly. Organizations with more than 50% of IT services automated were more likely to feel that the IT department is viewed as critical to the organization's growth and business strategy, compared with organizations with lower automation rates.

In other words, this isn't about replacing IT team members. Rather, it's about automating what can be automated. Managing the undifferentiated heavy lifting frees up your employees' valuable time and talent to work on the innovative, nuanced, high-impact tasks that will move your company forward — not just keep the boxes ticked. The electrical tape fixes that were tolerated early in the pandemic won't hold up in the future.

The companies that thrive in the next phase of digital business will be those that embrace automation and reassign team members to strategic projects and empower them to tackle critical business challenges.

Methodology: Ivanti surveyed 250 enterprise IT professionals across North America, APAC and EMEA from August to October 2021.

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Why a Critical Shift to Your IT Department Could Save the Whole Company

Rex McMillan

Too much to do. Not enough people to do it.

That's the challenge facing a wide range of departments across nearly every conceivable industry. The tight labor market is enough of a headache on its own, but right now it's happening at the same time as an unprecedented digital transformation. The rapid acceleration of digital transformation meant companies around the world performed an electrical tape transformation; that is to say they did it as fast as possible with a slew of not-so-pretty temporary fixes and crossed their fingers that it would hold until they could take the time to make thorough, permanent updates.

Now that it's high time to make those permanent updates, their IT departments are overtaxed and tapped out. A new survey of IT professionals reveals just how tough things are — and gives a glimpse into what's at stake if we don't rally behind IT.

The Numbers Don't Lie

72%. That's the number of respondents who reported losing IT team members recently. And that astronomical turnover isn't simply because there wasn't a nice holiday bonus or enough vacation. The #1 reason for attrition: a high workload.

Companies know how important their IT departments are, especially now — with 61% of respondents affirming that IT is critical to an organization's growth and business strategy.

And yet, nearly one-third (32%) of respondents cited "lack of executive support" as another reason for leaving, along with "unrealistic expectations placed on the team."

Translation: Companies know they need IT. They're ramping up IT workload. But they aren't giving IT the right support. The result is being felt across the enterprise, with "keeping up with digital transformation" (32%) and "keeping talent in technical roles" (26%) cited as the two biggest challenges organizations face today. With technology more important than ever, companies can't afford to compromise in this key area. Letting IT fall apart means putting the entire company at risk.

Onward and Upward

How can companies give IT more support when demand is high and resources are spread too thin?

One clear pathway to relieving the strain on IT is to adopt automation. Two-thirds of decision-makers reported that the pandemic led them to accelerate plans for, or increase adoption of, automated IT service offerings. Still, only one percent of those decision-makers have actually completed their adoption of automated services, according to the survey.

That leaves 99% of IT teams at risk of being overtaxed and under-supported. The shift to automation means a lift up front, but the payoff is significant. The majority (55%) of survey respondents reported that automating IT processes saved the IT department between one and eight hours per service request. Not overall, not per week — per individual request. For organizations with more than 50% of their IT services automated, that number jumps to more than 16 hours. If these numbers hold true for your organization, you could automate just three service requests in a week and eliminate the equivalent of six days of full-time effort from an employee.

Think automation diminishes the value of your IT team?

Hardly. Organizations with more than 50% of IT services automated were more likely to feel that the IT department is viewed as critical to the organization's growth and business strategy, compared with organizations with lower automation rates.

In other words, this isn't about replacing IT team members. Rather, it's about automating what can be automated. Managing the undifferentiated heavy lifting frees up your employees' valuable time and talent to work on the innovative, nuanced, high-impact tasks that will move your company forward — not just keep the boxes ticked. The electrical tape fixes that were tolerated early in the pandemic won't hold up in the future.

The companies that thrive in the next phase of digital business will be those that embrace automation and reassign team members to strategic projects and empower them to tackle critical business challenges.

Methodology: Ivanti surveyed 250 enterprise IT professionals across North America, APAC and EMEA from August to October 2021.

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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 ...