The real price you are paying for an IT department stuck in 2015
A hidden and massive damage of $7 million a year due to loss of productivity of idle employees is the true cost of outdated IT approaches.
A hidden and massive damage of $7 million a year (!) due to loss of productivity of idle employees (screenshot from "The IT Crowd").
By Tal Dagan
It is unpleasant to say, but many IT departments have gained an unflattering reputation. In their defense — and this is certainly known — they are collapsing under the load, but there is another urgent problem: technologically, they are often left behind. While development, product, and DevOps departments are implementing the newest tools and models, many IT departments are still working with "sticks and stones." Limited technology necessarily leads to limited efficiency, and it affects everyone: a small malfunction is enough to disable employees, delay processes, and harm the productivity of an entire organization.
Let's return for a moment to the roots. The IT department in an organization meets two main needs: the first is keeping systems updated and secure (even when there is a separate security department, the adherence to updating systems is directly related to information security). The second need is maintaining work continuity, with as few interruptions as possible to the completion of personal tasks and the organizational flow.
However, it doesn't always work smoothly. The initial response time to a ticket in IT departments stands at 7 hours on average, and the average time to resolution is 22 hours. It doesn't end there, because by the time they return, a game of "broken telephone" begins: the requester has already moved on to another matter, is in a meeting, or is busy with personal tasks. When "later" arrives, the technician has already left, and so on.
To better understand what disables employees, we analyzed thousands of tickets and discovered that in first place, by a gap, are problems with user accounts and identity management. Following them: software and licensing issues, email, application operation, and network connectivity. More than a quarter of the malfunctions completely disable the workday, and in two-thirds of the cases, it is a partial disablement.
The price of all this is expensive, very expensive. An analysis we conducted in an organization of about 5,000 employees shows that direct IT costs stand at $2 million, but to them is added a hidden and massive damage of $7 million a year due to loss of productivity of idle employees — which brings the real cost to $9 million.
The secret sauce of new IT systems
Here is where the new IT systems enter the picture, which change everything. Instead of a technician having to be involved in solving all malfunctions, they are handled by autonomous agents. This allows technicians to free up time for strategic projects and more complex tasks, without disturbing employees. These systems are capable of solving a large part of the malfunctions and tasks without human touch, end-to-end, while more complex malfunctions are escalated with all the relevant information already collected.
The secret sauce of these systems is the agent that operates on top of the hardware components. It transmits to the cloud, receives commands, and acts bi-directionally; it monitors the endpoint equipment, CPU, and services. It knows which diagnostics to run and which actions will solve the problem, based on the system's accumulated knowledge — from closing a tab and clearing cache to restarting services and disk optimization.
The new systems also know how to solve malfunctions even before they occur, in what is called proactive IT: instead of waiting for a ticket, the system can identify in advance a disk that is filling up, a service about to crash, or a computer that has not been updated.
Why isn't everyone there yet?
The aversion to AI due to security and privacy issues is understandable, but the human factor remains necessary for core tasks, "Human in the loop" control, and monitoring. In innovative organizations, implementation is usually fast as they see the potential to free up employees for revenue-generating tasks. In traditional industries, the driver is cost reduction: every percentage of efficiency improvement boosts profits.
No matter what the ambition for AI implementation is, an organization that will not be there, sooner or later, will find itself out of the competition.
What to do with the time that has been freed up?
IT departments are changing before our eyes. The change in the nature of the tasks requires a slightly different type of technician, sometimes requiring additional training for systemic and root problems: security infrastructures, better organization of Active Directory or Entra ID, and precise permission hierarchies.
Finally, a tip: share the plans at an early stage with the IT team and the company's employees. A good system is one that is where the user is — in Teams, Slack, email, or WhatsApp. The goal is to streamline work, not to add more screens.
The author is the Chief Product Officer at Atera
