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

Manufacturing Organizations Doubled AI Investment Yet Only 37% Fully Prepared to Operationalize AI

While 87% of manufacturing leaders and technical specialists report that ROI from their AIOps initiatives has met or exceeded expectations, only 37% say they are fully prepared to operationalize AI at scale, according to The Future of IT Operations in the AI Era, a report from Riverbed ...

Optimizing Decisions with Edge-First Cognitive Intelligence

Many organizations rely on cloud-first architectures to aggregate, analyze, and act on their operational data ... However, not all environments are conducive to cloud-first architectures ... There are limitations to cloud-first architectures that render them ineffective in mission-critical situations where responsiveness, cost control, and data sovereignty are non-negotiable; these limitations include ...

The New Perimeter Is the User: Why Identity Is the Real Network Edge

For years, cybersecurity was built around a simple assumption: protect the physical network and trust everything inside it. That model made sense when employees worked in offices, applications lived in data centers, and devices rarely left the building. Today's reality is fluid: people work from everywhere, applications run across multiple clouds, and AI-driven agents are beginning to act on behalf of users. But while the old perimeter dissolved, a new one quietly emerged ...

When AI Infrastructure Stops Behaving Like Infrastructure

For years, infrastructure teams have treated compute as a relatively stable input. Capacity was provisioned, costs were forecasted, and performance expectations were set based on the assumption that identical resources behaved identically. That mental model is starting to break down. AI infrastructure is no longer behaving like static cloud capacity. It is increasingly behaving like a market ...

Enterprise Resilience: Understanding the Shift from Static to Dynamic

Resilience can no longer be defined by how quickly an organization recovers from an incident or disruption. The effectiveness of any resilience strategy is dependent on its ability to anticipate change, operate under continuous stress, and adapt confidently amid uncertainty ...

Mobile Users Expect Perfection in 2026

Mobile users are less tolerant of app instability than ever before. According to a new report from Luciq, No Margin for Error: What Mobile Users Expect and What Mobile Leaders Must Deliver in 2026, even minor performance issues now result in immediate abandonment, lost purchases, and long-term brand impact ...

AI Confidence Is High. Readiness Is Not. What the Data Tells Us - and Why It Matters

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the dominant force shaping enterprise data strategies. Boards expect progress. Executives expect returns. And data leaders are under pressure to prove that their organizations are "AI-ready" ...

Agentic AI, Realistic Expectations and the Future of IT Operations in 2026

Agentic AI is a major buzzword for 2026. Many tech companies are making bold promises about this technology, but many aren't grounded in reality, at least not yet. This coming year will likely be shaped by reality checks for IT teams, and progress will only come from a focus on strong foundations and disciplined execution ...

Trust, But Verify: Building Confidence in AI Through Human Oversight

AI systems are still prone to hallucinations and misjudgments ... To build the trust needed for adoption, AI must be paired with human-in-the-loop (HITL) oversight, or checkpoints where humans verify, guide, and decide what actions are taken. The balance between autonomy and accountability is what will allow AI to deliver on its promise without sacrificing human trust ...

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