While working in IT – development, engineering, administration, support – is considered one of the most enjoyable jobs in the world, it is also a source of burnout. The main causes are excessive workloads, excessive working hours, lack of recognition and lack of challenge, explains Nick Kolakowski in a recent Dice report.
Let’s take a closer look at the first two factors: workload and excessive working hours. While technology professionals have many activities to do at the same time, one of the things that most clutters their days is the overwhelming number of glitches, outages, breaches and other incidents that require their attention.
When systems fail, end users and customers can become extremely frustrated. Of course, IT teams take care of this. But they’re just as frustrated as anyone else when it comes to problem-solving.
More than half of IT managers say they receive more incidents than they can handle
Business leaders should be frustrated too, because this represents a real cost to their organization. Incidents can cost large businesses more than $100 million annually, according to a recent analysis from Constellation Research. “Even more surprising is that 49% of these incidents are simple and repetitive, and can be automated,” observes report author Andy Thurai of Constellation Research.
More than half of the 317 IT leaders who responded to Constellation’s survey, or 57 percent, say they receive more incidents than they can handle. “This situation is alarming, especially as the number of incidents continues to increase and incident response teams are already overwhelmed,” said Thurai. “A poor incident response experience, with manual and repetitive work, can lead to employee attrition.” In fact, it is the number one cause of employee attrition.
Added to this is a lack of support and awareness from the organization. “Management lacks visibility into the largest incidents, team work, team burnout and incident response costs,” observes Mr. Thurai. “Continuing old practices leads to too many alerts, which creates alert fatigue.”
“Companies have not reduced the rate of major incidents with their cloud production infrastructure”
While there are robust tools and platforms on the market that help automate and mitigate this, the growth of cloud, analytics, and distributed systems has made incident response even more complex. “Incidents, whether major or minor, are more frequent than expected,” the investigation indicates. Additionally, “the current way of responding to incidents is failing.”
Progress has been made in the five years since Constellation’s previous investigation into this topic. In both cases, more than a third of respondents reported more than five major incidents in the past 12 months in their cloud production infrastructures. (34% this year, a slight drop from 38% five years ago).
“In other words, companies have not reduced the rate of major incidents with their cloud production infrastructure,” Thurai points out. He cites the growing adoption rates of cloud computing and new applications being deployed, as well as the dominance of manual processes for responding to IT incidents. Added to this is a shortage of qualified IT personnel, who are already overwhelmed by multiple demands.
Companies with a high degree of automation respond most effectively to incidents
Constellation’s survey shows that IT leaders are almost unanimous on the need for action. Nine in ten agree that companies with a high degree of automation respond most effectively to incidents. The same number states that “application downtime is one of the leading causes of customer dissatisfaction and churn.”
Here are some of the steps Thurai recommends to reduce burnout:
- Automate as much as possible. This should include self-repair capabilities. “These can be remediation measures before or after automation to avoid incidents.
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Educate and train: Helping IT staff become “more competent so they can resolve incidents without escalation.” - Embark on the professions. Every board member should ask their IT leaders these questions: If a major incident happened to us, how would you handle it? Would we be able to manage it and prove to our customers that we are worthy of their trust, or would we screw it up and cease to exist? If we are not prepared today, how can we be? Ask for an action plan and evidence. Be prepared to fund what is necessary to make this happen.”
- Take a team approach. Thurai advocates “automated creation of collaboration rooms”, as well as “creation of conference or video call links associated with the incident to reduce the need for manual intervention and save valuable time during major incidents.
Measures to combat incident fatigue also create a work atmosphere that is rewarding, meaningful and – yes, I say it – fun.
Source: “ZDNet.com”