A new survey of IT professionals found that keeping up with digital transformation (32%) and keeping talent in technical roles (26%) are the two biggest challenges their organisations face today.
IT is critical to growth but challenges remain
The study also found that IT departments are viewed as critical to an organisation’s growth and business strategy by 61% of respondents. Despite this high level of support for the IT department, 72% of respondents reported losing team members with 41% of respondents citing a high workload as the top reason for losing team members.
The pandemic accelerated the rapid shift to remote work. About 67% reported they accelerated their plans or increased their adoption of automated IT service offerings due to the pandemic.
Of note, only 1% of decision-makers have already completed their adoption of automated services. In today’s everywhere workplace, employees expect to be able to connect with various devices to corporate networks, data, and services.
The need to keep these devices and services connected has placed stress on IT team members that could be alleviated by the implementation of automated IT services.
The study found that 55% of respondents reported automating IT processes saving the IT department 1 - 8 hours per service request. For organisations with over 50% of their IT services automated, the time saved per service request jumped to more than 16 hours.
“The workloads and pressure to perform that have been placed on IT teams will only continue to increase,” said Nayaki Nayyar, president and chief product officer, Ivanti.
She opined that the only way to alleviate some of these stresses and retain technical talent is to implement automation into IT services so that team members can focus their attention on activities that drive the business forward and contribute to the business strategy.
Differences of opinion
There was a disconnect between C-suite/vice president and managers/directors with managers and directors viewing the IT department as a cost centre (27%) versus 19% of c-suite/vice president respondents.
Organisations with more than 50% of IT services automated were more likely to feel the IT department is viewed as critical to the organisation’s growth and business strategy (74%), demonstrating the value of automation.
Only 32% feel the executive team views IT as only around to troubleshoot hardware or software issues compared to 47% of all respondents.
Routine manual tasks consume IT and service desk resources and limit team members’ ability to move ahead with higher-impact strategic projects. Every minute saved is 60 seconds freed to reassign people to innovation, strategic projects and critical business challenges.
Automation streamlines the management of complex hybrid environments by automating infrastructure, cloud, and workspace automation processes required to support the business.
