Cost cutting no longer top IT priority – what is?

IT leaders are less focused on cutting costs and turning their attention to the broader goal of building the business. In a recent survey by McKinsey of 800 IT executives, those citing their top priority as reducing IT costs dropped from 44 percent to 31 percent since 2011. “Improving the effectiveness of business processes” now ranks as the top concern for over 61 percent, which is an increase of 14% since the last survey.

In line with the shift from cost cutting, 64 percent say their budgets for new investments will increase this year, although that increase isn’t necessarily headcount, as those surveyed were evenly split on increases/decreases in operational spending.

But increased spending doesn’t mean everything is looking up for these tech executives. Just 42 percent rated their own departments as being effective at managing their infrastructures, which was a slide of seven points. Some problems have held relatively even—only one in five felt they are effective at “driving technology enablement or innovation in business processes and operations.”

A long-standing area of need in IT remains the retention and development of IT talent. The survey listed conditions that would most help organizations improve effectiveness of talent acquisition. Topping the list was improved culture, energy and morale of the IT organization—possibly resulting from years of cost-cutting mentality, and in the second spot, more competitive salary and benefits. More than a third of respondents listed “more cutting-edge, exciting work within IT.”

At Uplogix, we’ve long said that removing some of the Level 1 tasks from the plate of an IT administrator through automation has impact beyond lowering support costs and reducing opportunities for human error and shortcutting. All of these tasks have an opportunity cost for both the admin and their employer that makes it harder to provide more cutting-edge and exciting work within IT.

Shed those basic network management tasks with network-independent intensive monitoring that feeds an intelligent platform that follows your runbook to take care of the day-to-day issues that eat up so much of IT’s time. And for the times when it’s more than level 1, Uplogix serves as longer arms and better tools to ensure that tasks can be done remotely and faster than traditional network management.

If you’re tired of taking IT management surveys or are looking to find ways to impact network infrastructure management in your company, check out Uplogix today.

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