Report Shows No-Code Automation Can Reduce IT Resource Drain, Scut Work

A new market study from InformationWeek has revealed IT teams are spending weeks, sometimes even months, of people-hours per year on mundane tasks that are repetitive in nature. This type of scut work is often draining on IT resources and offers little to a group of employees often looking to be challenged by complex technical problems. As a result, these employees can burn out fast and seek work elsewhere leaving companies shorthanded and scrambling to fill open positions.

In addition, if an organization has a lot of manual scut work that needs to be handled then it’s likely there’s a backlog of projects waiting to be worked on while these menial, administrative tasks get completed.

IT is Overwhelmed with Repetitive, Manual Work

The data is clear, across industries highly skilled IT workers are spending much of their valuable time on repetitive, mundane tasks:

• 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.

It’s no surprise that the majority of these tasks are things like onboarding and offboarding users, name changes, department changes, password resets and software provisioning. A quick calculation shows that an employee who spends 10 hours a week on these manual tasks is wasting more than one financial quarter every year completing these.

Not only is this draining corporate resources, but it also wears on the souls of the IT specialists who are called to their profession to innovate, not to do technical grunt work.

When you look at these statistics in light of the Great Resignation, which has had workers of all types quitting their unsatisfying jobs to pursue more rewarding work, that should rightfully concern IT managers.

The survey linked this onslaught of repetitive work to IT employee satisfaction and the results weren’t pretty. Approximately 90% of respondents say that manual and repetitive IT tasks contribute to low morale and attrition in their organizations.

The top five tasks this wasted time is spent on are:

• Password resets.
• IT ticket clean up.
• Onboarding/offboarding employees.
• Managing credentials.
• Software provisioning.

Automating the Mundane with Enterprise Integration and Automation

Low-code/no-code automation tools like iPaaS are a great way to automate and integrate systems across an organization and reduce the toil, allowing your organization to be more competitive and nimbler with less friction and a better end-user experience.

iPaaS centralizes all integrations into one hub with a library of connectors to common systems such as Workday, Oracle, your IT service management (ITSM) platform, Salesforce, the Active Directory, Azure, and hundreds more, as well as any APIs. With all systems connected and data points now secured in one spot, end-users can leverage the platform to move data, transform data, and build out automation and workflows using a visual flow builder that can be triggered from a field change, form fill or any number of actions.

By combining ITSM/ESM, project portfolio management (PPM) and iPaaS on a single platform you can automate tasks, both simple and complex, as well as connect disparate systems throughout your organization – all through a codeless platform, meaning anyone can use it. You no longer need to be bogged down by repetitive or mundane service requests.

At Pima County, one of the goals of bringing on TeamDynamix for ITSM and iPaaS (integration platform as a service) is to reduce toil.  

“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.

“Our ITSM is our entry point to our entire IT organization, and we want our employees to graduate out of this area into other roles within our organization – network technicians, client services, desktop technicians, developers and project managers,” he continued. “If all they’re doing is handling tickets and doing the same mundane, manual tasks over and over that’s not particularly great training. So investing in tools that allow our employees to engage in meaningful work is something that’s important to us as an overall IT organization.”

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.

“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.”

Want to learn more? Check out the latest market study from InformationWeek: State of IT – Resource Drain.