How to Win the IT Talent Shortage War
With more than 4,500 employees spread across the globe, the UK-based investment management company was challenged to support dispersed user groups that depended on highly performing technology to satisfy clients.
Here’s how Lakeside Software’s Digital Experience Cloud, powered by SysTrack, enabled the firm to expand its visibility, achieve a successful VDI rollout, adopt a proactive IT approach, and consistently deliver a quality end-user experience.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut. Ut ad minim veniam.
With World Productivity Day fast approaching on June 20, we want to recognize the importance of creating an environment that supports workplace productivity.
If you Google “Top Productivity Killers,” you’ll get a series of expected answers: cell phones, internet browsing, conversations with colleagues, etc. But what’s notably missing are the digital disruptions that impact an employee’s ability to do their job.
In May, we conducted a weekly LinkedIn poll not necessarily to challenge Google’s findings but for us to better understand employee productivity in the
It is no secret that the war for technical talent has left many organizations with a severe shortage of IT staff, especially level III technical support analysts. Part of the problem stems from a sudden rise in the need for staff that can build and support a growing remote and hybrid workforce.
If there is a victim in this war for talent, it would be the IT help desk itself. Recent data shows rising stress and burnout across IT help desks worldwide; for example, a global study of more than 36,200 IT professionals found that two in five of those workers are at high risk of burnout. Forty-two percent of those were considering quitting in the next six months.
One way to win the IT talent war is to take care of your talent at home. How can organizations improve the IT help desk experience for their agents, with the bonus of a trickle-down positive experience for their customers?
A Gartner survey found that just 29% of IT workers had “high intent” to stay with their current employer. This job market has created a talent squeeze that is keenly felt on the IT help desk.
Some of the challenges facing help desk support agents include:
• Increasing complexity of systems, software, and networks. IT help desks must deal with a wide range of issues across various platforms, operating systems, and applications. BYOD policies that allow remote workers to use their own devices have further complicated their jobs.
•Constant pressure to improve response and resolution times. End users today are often impatient with anything less than an immediate solution. Add the stress of piles of support tickets — coupled with a widespread shortage of experienced IT staff — and you have a recipe for increased employee turnover.
•Cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, and IT help desks are crucial in responding to them by helping to assess the impact and deploying patches. Ever-changing cyber threats add pressure to mitigate digital risks, respond to data breaches, and ensure compliance with data-protection regulations.
•Communication and knowledge management has grown more complex, along with IT architectures. As technologies evolve, managing and maintaining an up-to-date knowledge base is more challenging.
IT help desks and their management teams must continuously improve workflows and processes by adopting technologies to respond more efficiently. Automation is one way to lessen the reliance on our overburdened human agents while also reducing the need for new talent.
Highly proficient help desk agents are harder to find than ever; 60% of CIOs place the talent shortage as a top-of-mind worry for 2023.
That’s why many forward-thinking IT teams are looking for ways to automate more remedial tasks and processes to save valuable person-hours for more strategic, business-centric efforts. By removing mundane tasks from your IT support desk and implementing end-user self-service, your team can work smarter, not harder. IT teams can focus on issues escalated to level III or critical status. Automation becomes the work-life balance that’s been missing all along.
The value of automation for your IT help desk includes:
•Proactive issue resolution. Technology can enable a “Self-Healing Help Desk” model that uses automated alerts and notifications for system failures, performance bottlenecks, or security breaches. Certain issues can be resolved through automated remediation. For example, AI-empowered automation software can detect a service outage and attempt a reboot before triggering human intervention.
•Consistent and standardized service delivery. Automation reduces human error and inconsistencies, ensuring all support requests follow a consistent path from initiation to resolution. This consistency leads to improved service quality.
•Access to data-driven insights for continuous improvement. Automation tools can spot patterns, trends, and bottlenecks by analyzing support-ticket data. These insights enhance service quality, optimize resource allocation, and prioritize improvements.
•Operational scalability and flexibility. If the volume of support requests increases, automation tools can handle a higher workload without requiring a proportional increase in human resources.
Automation can play a significant role in reducing the mean time to resolution (MTTR) for IT help desks through:
•Ticket routing and prioritization that analyzes and classifies incoming support tickets based on criteria such as urgency, impact, and complexity. This workflow eliminates delays caused by manual ticket triage and ensures that the most critical issues receive immediate attention.
•Automatic escalation if an issue remains unresolved within a specified timeframe, bumping the ticket to higher-level support or subject matter expert. Automation software can also provide real-time visibility, support communication, and enable knowledge sharing among your agents.
• Performance monitoring and predictive analytics can continuously analyze help desk metrics. Importantly, predictive analytics prompts preventive action, such as applying patches or allocating additional resources to reduce IT incidents before they occur.
Automation can play a crucial role in helping companies address the IT talent shortage by augmenting existing help-desk resources, improving operational efficiency, and leveraging technology to bridge skill gaps. Intelligent data is crucial for getting automation right.
Automation doesn’t mean replacing humans. But companies can apply automation to make humans better in the work they do. Done well, automation frees IT professionals to become business enablers – serving as proactive consultants rather than getting mired in crisis after crisis.
Lakeside’s SysTrack platform helps clients win the IT talent shortage war by streamlining and empowering trouble ticket resolution. Find out more by requesting a demo today.
JavaScript Placeholder
