Digital transformation and talent retention are the biggest challenges for IT: Ivanti

Ivanti, the automation platform that discovers, manages, secures and services IT assets from cloud to edge, has found that keeping up with digital transformation (32%) and keeping talent in technical roles (26%) are the two biggest challenges that IT professionals say their organisations face today.

Source: Ivanti infographic. Over six in 10 executive teams consider the IT department critical to their organisation's success.

Additionally, the study found that IT departments are viewed as critical to an organisation’s growth and business strategy by 61% of respondents. However, 72% of respondents reported losing team members, with 41% of respondents citing a high workload as the top reason why. Other reasons included:

- Unrealistic expectations placed on the team (34%) 

- Lack of executive support (32%) 

- Remote work was not a possibility (28%) 

- Executive hesitancy to adopt automation (26%) 

- Lack of critical technology to effectively do their job (24%)

Ivanti revealed that there is a disconnect between C-Suite/VP and Managers/Directors as demonstrated by the finding that Managers and Directors are more likely to report that the IT department was viewed as only a cost centre (27%) versus 19% of C-suite/VP respondents who only viewed IT as a cost centre. 

The pandemic accelerated the rapid shift to remote work and two-thirds of decision-makers (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. 

Ivanti notes that 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 company said. 

The study found that the majority (55%) of respondents reported automating IT processes saving the IT department 1 - 8 hours per service request. For organisations which have over half of their IT services automated, the time saved per service request jumped to more than 16 hours. 

“Employees are working differently than they have in years before, and we’ll continue to see an evolution of how people work as we move into the future and beyond the pandemic,” said Nayaki Nayyar, President and Chief Product Officer, Ivanti. 

“The workloads and pressure to perform that have been placed on IT teams will only continue to increase. 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.” 

Organisations with more than half 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. Of this group, 32% feel the executive team views IT as only around to troubleshoot hardware or software issues vs. 47% of all respondents.

*Ivanti surveyed 250 enterprise IT professionals across North America, Asia Pacific, and Europe, Middle East and Africa from August to October 2021.