In today’s companies, most IT teams are responsible for monitoring systems and all other infrastructure and tools that keep the company's digital side running.
This increases pressure and generally leads to overwork, which means these teams can’t focus on improving their company’s systems, which would increase their productivity. Instead, they’re forced to focus mostly on solving more immediate issues, negatively impacting the business when something goes wrong.
Read on to learn how to stop wasting resources and transform your IT management today.
A great example was in 2018 when Allegro, an e-commerce platform in Poland, faced significant issues during a major sales event. The platform experienced severe downtime and performance issues due to an overwhelming surge in traffic from a marketing campaign.
This resulted in:
- Customer Frustration: Many users couldn’t access the website or complete their purchases, leading to negative feedback.
- Lost Sales: This downtime meant missed opportunities during a critical sales period.
- Reputation Damage: The incident hurt Allegro’s reputation, as customers lost trust in the platform’s reliability.
This is just one example that underscores the importance of communication between departments and funding to ensure that IT infrastructure can handle increased traffic from marketing campaigns.
The Budget Challenge and Pressure on IT Teams
IT budgets are often smaller than those of other departments because of the mistaken belief that there's no need to invest more when everything seems to be running smoothly. However, this mindset is counterproductive. Things appear “fine” because small IT teams are overworked, constantly putting out fires to keep systems running. As a result, they spend most of their time fixing immediate problems rather than focusing on improvements and long-term planning.
A great example of this was the recent CrowdStrike incident, which had a major impact because it was the single solution used for security compliance for the affected companies.
The false sense of security of passing the burden of support and responsibility to a supplier looks fine on paper. Still, in the real world, when things go down, the IT teams are on the floor fixing them because the supplier either does not respond quickly enough or is unable to do so remotely. In this case, the only way to fix the broken systems was to manually intervene in each one, which meant that the small IT teams that usually worked remotely had to drive to every single location to fix the servers and computers, resulting in a massive amount of downtime, lost revenue and in some cases even in death, with emergency and hospital systems being affected as well.
When an incident causes downtime or has a big enough impact, management does not care that “supplier X” is responsible and has not yet fixed the issue. It only wants the issue to disappear and puts every resource available working on it under immense pressure, which might cause even more mistakes to happen during the process.
To make matters worse, the lessons learned after these events don’t seem to be focused on team improvement. After requiring teams to go above and beyond, there have been many cases where they were even faced with budget cuts instead of being rewarded with an increased budget and tools that they could use to prevent these issues and perform even better in the future.
The Need for a Paradigm Shift
We need to change the paradigm to optimize costs, minimize the impact on business, and increase transparency towards management.
Monitoring systems should be enhanced with automation so that there is a layer of proactive response to problems. This will help reduce the teams' workload, as the system will attempt corrections automatically.
With more availability, teams will be able to expand the scope of the systems and monitor data from other business areas as well, creating a “single pane of glass” where data can be correlated to find the root cause of problems and improve business KPIs.
Informed Decision-Making
Management makes decisions based on data.
However, this data typically does not show the bigger picture. It does not incorporate all relevant data when making decisions, which results in making wrong decisions that directly affect business. Without a commitment to focusing on a serious retrospective after events, management will continue to be clueless about why things keep getting worse.
Luckily, this is where IT teams can provide amazing value. If they are not overworked with daily tasks and are allowed to work smarter with better tools, they can help management centralize all data and processes and provide a “single pane of glass” that can provide a bigger picture and allow for drill-down information. This will grant management to make informed decisions based on accurate data.
Examples of this are:
1. If a company in the food business has a high rate of food waste, centralizing all its data can help it better estimate how much stock it will need to reduce waste. This will give it the tools and knowledge to negotiate better prices with its suppliers and thus increase profits.-
- Linas Matkasse, now Cheffelo, the most significant meal kit supplier in the Nordics, managed to get accurate estimations about their food demand with a powerful forecasting solution created by Syone that allowed them to reduce food waste and lowered operational costs.
- Linas Matkasse, now Cheffelo, the most significant meal kit supplier in the Nordics, managed to get accurate estimations about their food demand with a powerful forecasting solution created by Syone that allowed them to reduce food waste and lowered operational costs.
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- One of our clients, an international FCMG chain, after hiring Syone’s Managed Services, experienced significant improvements in operational efficiency, reduced incident volume, and faster resolution times, which allowed them to focus on their core business activities.
- One of our clients, an international FCMG chain, after hiring Syone’s Managed Services, experienced significant improvements in operational efficiency, reduced incident volume, and faster resolution times, which allowed them to focus on their core business activities.
The Bottom Line
The lack of automation in monitoring and reporting operations wastes valuable resources and prevents IT teams from reaching their full potential.
By investing in automated systems, companies can transform their approach from reactive to proactive, reducing the pressure on teams and allowing them to focus on continuous improvements.
This shift optimizes costs and minimizes the impact on the business. It also provides an integrated and comprehensive view of data, essential for making informed and strategic decisions.
Ultimately, automation is crucial for any organization wishing to remain competitive and efficient in today's market.
Is your company ready to make the jump and get ahead of the competition?
Syone is ready to be your partner and sail into the open future with you!
