Features

Lack of Automation Forcing IT Staffs to Work Overtime: Study

By Sophia Mayengbam

IT professionals are still forced to work outside of regular business hours to execute routine IT tasks reveals a study conducted by King Research, a high-tech and enterprise computing market research firm.

Eighty-seven percent of mid-market IT staff forced to work nights, weekends and holidays. According to the study only 13 percent of IT staff in mid-size companies are able to avoid working evenings, weekends and holidays, compared to 20% at large companies and 34% at small companies.

The study blames the lack of automation, and repetitive and time consuming IT processes such as patch management, inventory and new machine deployment for the hours demanded of IT professionals outside of work. All these could be easily avoided if the companies adopt automation.

"Corporate IT departments spend significant time and resources managing their server and desktop computers. Many of these tasks -- patch management, inventory, new machine deployment, and many others -- can be time consuming and expensive" said Diane Hagglund of King Research.

Mostly companies avoid the implementation of automation to save money. In mid-market companies, automation efforts are underway but have not yet been deployed to the full range of repetitive automation-capable IT processes, including patch management, software/hardware inventory, software distribution, security enforcement, helpdesk ticket management and new machine deployment.

Nineteen percent of participants in mid market space have essentially no IT automation, and for any given IT task, only half of the companies in this space automate the task.

The adoption of automation is much higher in larger companies at 82 percent. Whereas mid-market companies are automating their routine IT processes at 54 percent smaller companies at only 29 percent.

According to the study, most IT professionals using automation of IT processes preferred commercial tools over internally developed tools and scripts. The greatest complaints regarding automation tools had to do with their cost.
Lack of management support to acquire these tools and having no time to evaluate or use available tools as common challenges to using them are other factors hampering the implementation of automation.

King also researched IT server appliances -- the IT solution that bundles software on server hardware from a single vendor. Sixty-two percent owned or planned to purchase an appliance, and all respondents identified ease of maintenance and speed of deployment as among the most compelling potential benefits of using an IT appliance. Expectation of benefits was found to be in line with actual benefits appliances delivered.