Productivity is a persisting problem in the UK workforce, with preventable IT issues costing an estimated £62.4bn in revenue each year. Breakdown between issue identification, flagging and resolution is slowing down employee productivity, wasting a further £6.9bn in salary outlay, according to new research from IPsoft.
The research indicated a need for more intelligent IT systems as business users face IT issues that hamper their ability to work effectively for over 52 hours a year. The worst IT issues cost companies two full days of work per staff member annually.
Brand loyalty is crucial for commercial success, yet in the last 12 months, 58% of respondents experienced an IT issue that prevented them from providing a service to a customer. Worse still, half of the respondents suffered an IT malfunction that caused them to miss a deadline.
Frustration is rife as even short periods of downtime induce annoyance in two-thirds (64%) of workers. More than half of professionals (57%) at large companies complained of encountering greater IT problems at work than with their own tech for personal use.
Staff even confess to avoiding contact with IT if they can help it, with 42% of users saying they would try and find a workaround instead of raising an official report. A further one in three said they would turn to a colleague for tech assistance before approaching IT.
Cognitive computing, artificial intelligence and natural language processing are surely the twenty-first century answers to these costly issues. But how and where do communications need to be improved?
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The first place to start would naturally be between IT departments and the infrastructures’ internal users. Business users admit to a loose grip on technical language, with just over half (51%) of respondents expressing a preference to verbally describe their IT problems rather than writing them down. Instead, business users prefer to speak through their IT issues in simple language. This begs this question of whether suitable automated or AI solutions can be implemented within a firm to increase resolution speed and free up IT directors.
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Chetan Dube, CEO, IPsoft, said, “IT is both the accelerator for digital transformation and paradoxically the stumbling block for digital strategies. These findings show that business users want an altogether different experience from their interactions with IT and the processes it supports.
“Business users want to be able to talk to their IT applications and have the applications solve their problems or requests, thereby disintermediating large segments of classic IT operations and ticket generating systems.”
The study, commissioned by IPsoft and carried out by independent research house 3Gem, surveyed 3,000 respondents working at large enterprises with 250+ UK employees.
