A recent study from InformationWeek found:
- 58% of organizations say their IT team spends more than five hours per week (six-and-a-half work weeks annually) fulfilling repetitive requests from the business.
- 90% of respondents say that manual and repetitive IT tasks contribute to low morale and attrition in their organizations.
- 45% of IT teams spend more than five hours per week writing scripts for workflow and automation.
As the study shows, across industries highly skilled IT workers spend much of their time on repetitive, mundane tasks to either service their customers, or to tie together the growing ecosystem of apps and cloud services procured by their organization to support the business.
The data shows that 58 percent of organizations say their IT team spends more than five hours per week on repetitive requests from business stakeholders, and more than one in five say they are averaging 10 or more hours per week on these tasks.
These requests include things like onboarding new employees, name changes, department changes and provisioning software.
And while these tasks are prime candidates for automation – the reality is that 40 percent of those surveyed report that 25 percent or more of these tasks must be done manually for one reason or another.
A quick calculation shows that an IT worker (or team) who spends 10 hours a week on these manual tasks wastes more than one financial quarter every year on things like resetting passwords for people.
Not only is this draining corporate resources, but it can be draining on the morale of IT employees who often join a company seeking to innovate and problem solve – not get bogged down with technical grunt work.
In fact, the survey found that 90 percent of respondents felt these types of repetitive manual IT tasks directly contributed to low morale and attrition within their IT organizations.
When asked to rank these types of tasks, the study found the top 5 time-wasting tasks are:
- Password resets.
- IT ticket clean up.
- Onboarding/offboarding employees.
- Managing credentials.
- Software provisioning.
At Pima County, one of the goals of bringing on TeamDynamix for IT Service Management (ITSM) and iPaaS (integration platform as a service) is to reduce the toil caused by these types of tasks.
“People feel so much more empowered and have so much more worth when they are doing things that are intellectually rigorous and challenging versus when they are just repeating the same mechanical actions over and over and over with very little thought,” Mark Hayes, information technology leader at Pima County, said.
With TeamDynamix now in place, Pima County is looking to automate and integrate as much of the manual ITSM processes into workflows as they can both in IT and throughout the rest of the organization.
“The drudgery of working through mundane, repetitive tasks doesn’t exist just in IT,” Hayes said. “I think the more we can reduce toil within the departments that we support, the more people are going to buy in and understand the value of what we’re trying to achieve. There’s nothing like success to breed more success, and once other departments see the benefits they’re going to want these tools too.”
iPaaS is a powerful tool for organizations looking to integrate systems and automate processes, offering improved security, time and resource savings and better service for end-users. By adopting an iPaaS solution, businesses can streamline their operations, enhance productivity and stay ahead in the competitive IT landscape.
Want to learn more about iPaaS and the positive impact it can have on an organization? Check out the latest market study from InformationWeek: State of IT – Resource Drain.