With tightening budgets and complex mainframe technology, it’s rarely possible for organisations to redevelop their entire tech stack. Consequently, reliance on outdated IT is an unfortunate reality for businesses the world over.
As legacy tech leads to more frequent issues and potential downtime, this poses a significant IT service management challenge. IT support teams are on the front line constantly battling to maintain their organisations’ mission critical systems and firefighting incidents before they become full blown outages.
Indeed, LogicMonitor’s Future Further Report, which surveyed 500 global IT leaders across a range of industries, revealed 70% spent more time on firefighting incidents than being proactive in their role. Rather than having bandwidth to focus on strategic work, IT service desks find themselves caught in a backlog of tickets and alerts which require immediate attention. Worryingly, nearly half of respondents spent more than 20% of their working week troubleshooting.
This is concerning for businesses, and particularly for the productivity of support desk staff. A significant 54% of IT teams say they delay resolving business issues while responding to incidents, and 35% sacrifice revenue-generating activities, resulting in harm to the bottom line.
Employees and their customers are bound to feel the impact of this bottleneck. Staff are forced to work with outdated tools and processes, which impede efficiency and collaboration, and the inability to upgrade these systems leads to dissatisfaction and
decreased engagement, impacting company culture.
Furthermore, increased downtime and prolonged resolution times result in declining customer satisfaction levels, in turn, eroding trust and loyalty. Given 40% of service desk teams are unable to work on improving customer and employee satisfaction due to dealing with incidents, businesses should be concerned.
So what must be done to get on top of legacy systems? The key lies in observability: IT decision makers should all be searching for a cohesive hybrid monitoring solution, one that enables every member of their support teams to view the same data, in the same language, and in the same place. Once in place, this would offer organisations a “single pane of glass” view.
When supported by an AI-powered hybrid monitoring solution offering holistic insights, organisations can gain 360° vision over their entire tech stack. Intelligent alerts further enable IT teams to respond to issues quickly and effectively before they cause downtime, whilst simple incidents can be identified and remedied automatically, freeing up support staff to proactively improve employee and customer experiences.
By equipping their IT support teams with this single pane of glass, businesses can not only get ahead of their existing legacy tech, but future-proof.
By Matt Tuson, General Manager EMEA, LogicMonitor
Meet the LogicMonitor team at stand 223 at SITS, The Service Desk & IT Support Show, on 17-18th April 2024, ExCeL London. You can now register for your free ticket here.