You didn’t buy an IT Service Management platform to create more work for your team. You bought it to streamline IT operations, improve service delivery, and support the business. Yet, for many IT leaders, the reality is starkly different.
Instead of driving innovation, highly skilled IT teams often find themselves spending 10 to 15 hours every week just on platform administration and maintenance. They are stuck configuring complex workflows, patching integrations, or waiting on vendor support for minor changes to things like forms.
We call this the “Admin Tax.” It is the hidden cost of complex, legacy ITSM systems. It’s the time, resources, and opportunity costs that these overly complicated platforms levy on your organization.
Your ITSM platform should reduce work, not create it. If your team is bogged down in administration, paying for modules you can’t even properly implement, or having to wait 3 weeks or more to make simple changes, you are paying a tax that your budget can’t afford.
What the Admin Tax Looks Like
The Admin Tax isn’t always a line item on an invoice. It hides in the operational inefficiencies that slow down your entire department. It thrives in environments where “powerful” is synonymous with “complicated.”
Here is how the tax usually manifests in a medium-to-large enterprise:
- Developer Dependency: You cannot make basic changes to workflows or forms without a specialized developer or a heavy lift from IT engineering.
- Glacial Deployment Cycles: Simple workflow adjustments that should take minutes end up taking weeks to test and deploy.
- Integration Nightmares: Connecting your ITSM tool to other enterprise systems requires custom code that breaks with every update, leading to constant maintenance.
- Endless Training: The platform is so non-intuitive that onboarding new staff takes months, and users constantly struggle to navigate the portal.
When you quantify this problem, the numbers are alarming. If a senior engineer spends 15 hours a week babysitting the help desk software, that is nearly 40% of their time lost. Over a year, that adds up to tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity per person.
We hear these pain points all the time from customers who’ve switched to TeamDynamix from other ITSM platforms like ServiceNow.
Tyler Kings, end user infrastructure manager for Stockman Bank, said they had to hire consultants to handle the administration of ServiceNow for the financial institution. This meant changes would take several weeks and often ended up costing the company additional money.
“The learning curve for [ServiceNow] was very steep,” He explained. “The cost of deploying any new workflow or automation was so high, even for basic processes.”
This eventually pushed the company to look for a new ITSM vendor. “We talked to a reference customer during our evaluation process who also migrated off of ServiceNow to TeamDynamix,” Kings said. “They shared with us that they moved from 5 people administering the platform for just one department, to 5 people managing TeamDynamix for 30 departments. TeamDynamix checked all the boxes for us.”
It was a similar story for the University of Michigan.
As Rhain Copeland, IT Operations Director, noted, before switching to TeamDynamix, updating a form was a “weeks-long, if not months-long effort”, leading to “incredible frustration” for everyone involved.
In addition, the extreme cost of ServiceNow meant the university couldn’t extend ITSM use to as many groups throughout their campuses as they needed to.
“With [ServiceNow] we had to be rather stingy with our licenses,” she said. “We’ve been able to flip that now [with TeamDynamix], and I think, overall, it has really helped our service delivery.”
Where AI Should Help (But Often Doesn’t)
Artificial Intelligence promises to solve these efficiency gaps. However, in the context of traditional ITSM, AI often creates a new layer of the Admin Tax.
Many legacy vendors are frantically bolting AI features onto their rigid frameworks to keep up with market trends. The result is often clumsy and difficult to manage. You might find “intelligent” tools that ironically require deep technical expertise to configure.
For example, consider chatbots. In a legacy environment, deploying a conversational AI bot might take months of data training and specialized configuration. If the bot requires a data scientist to operate, it isn’t an efficiency tool; it is just another complex system to manage.
The No-Code Alternative
There is a way to stop paying this Admin Tax. The solution lies in shifting away from code-heavy legacy tools toward modern, no-code platforms.
No-code ITSM tools like TeamDynamix democratize technology by allowing the people closest to the problem to build the solution. When you remove the need for coding, you eliminate the Admin Tax. This approach empowers your team to work smarter, not harder.
By leveraging a platform built for flexibility, you unlock significant performance gains:
- AI Service Assist: By automating ticket classification and routing, you can reduce ticket resolution time by 40% to 90%.
- Virtual Support Agents: Unlike the heavy chatbots of the past, modern VSAs can be ready in days, delivering 50% faster service without demanding hundreds of developer hours.
- Rapid Change: workflows can be adjusted in minutes via drag-and-drop interfaces, ensuring your IT operations evolve as fast as the business does.
At the University of Michigan, the ease of use allowed them to rapidly expand, integrating over 50 groups on campus with their own applications. This expansion simplifies the customer experience, as all tickets are visible in one portal, regardless of whether they are with HR, IT, or another school.
“These teams that we previously had to do all this development for can now be trained up to use [TeamDynamix] so they can develop and run their own applications,” Copeland said. “That was a great relief and gave my team more bandwidth to be able to train other groups that were interested in using the platform.”
For Stockman Bank, the company needed to build a critical integration between the ITSM tool and Microsoft Exchange. When using ServiceNow, the financial institution was told it would take weeks to complete and cost $50,000.
After switching to TeamDynamix ITSM, Kings said his team was able to build the integration in a single afternoon and at NO additional cost.
“TeamDynamix is a very powerful tool that we actually feel like we can use and get value out of,” Kings said.
Calculate Your Admin Tax
How much is complexity costing you right now? To figure out your Admin Tax, assess your current burden with this simple framework.
Ask yourself these three questions:
- How long does a standard workflow change take? (If the answer is measured in weeks, your tax is high.)
- Who is required to make that change? (If it requires a team of developers or a consultant, you are paying a premium.)
- What is the opportunity cost? (What strategic initiatives are sitting on the back burner because your best people are fixing the tool that is supposed to help them?)
Compare your answers to a no-code approach. If your current tool requires five people and three weeks to do what a no-code platform can do with one person in one hour, the financial and operational difference is undeniable.
Stop Paying the Tax
It is time to rethink what “powerful” ITSM looks like. It shouldn’t mean complex, expensive, or slow. It should mean agile, efficient, and scalable.
Your team should focus on innovation and digital transformation, not platform babysitting. Stop letting rigid tools dictate your pace of change.
See how TeamDynamix reduces admin overhead while scaling service delivery.