Why IT is broken

If an IT team in the modern world could start from scratch, how would they operate? Probably not in constantly fixing the same problems with the same causes, but rather on strategic work to prevent those problems in the first place.

IT workers are usually the people in an organization who can troubleshoot any issue, give you advice on network setup or buying a new device, and keep other teams from making serious tech mistakes. They’ve seen it all — outages, system failures, and whatever else the back-end infrastructure throws their way. If you’re a CEO, CFO, or IT director or manager, you likely know how valuable an IT team is to the business. That small, busy group of people keeps the entire company’s workforce up and running each day.

So why are these teams stuck in a permanent state of break, fix, and break again? Even with updated systems and skilled technicians, IT teams spend the majority of their time either maintaining day-to-day operations (57%) or reducing technical debt (18%), according to a recent survey.

That leaves very little time for strategic, forward-looking work for the IT team. It’s a permanent state of firefighting, and it isn’t because the tools or people aren’t doing their best. It’s because the operating model in place stems from a time when IT really did just fix problems as they arose. It’s reactive, rather than what it could be — a system that should prevent a lot of those problems (and repetitive IT work) from existing in the first place.

How broken IT shows up   

There are some common, very frustrating examples of IT’s brokenness at most organizations. They’re wasting time and wasting resources that could be much better spent in improving the overall IT back end.  

1. Arbitrary escalations

Even the most modern companies often have byzantine processes based on a setup from years or even decades ago. For example, your company might have an escalation path for any employee who requests access to software or reports a broken integration. The employee puts in a help desk ticket, which gets routed to a systems administrator, then to security or identity management, and finally to a department director or vice president for approval.

That part can take…much too long, depending on the approver. And why does this escalation exist? It isn’t because it’s a difficult or complex task. It’s just to satisfy an org chart, and can end up taking several days, when automation or a simpler approval path could solve it in minutes. It’s also not a good use of IT’s talent and time to chase down requests and take care of other basic disruptions.

2. Knowledge siloes

Within every company, there are tools, systems, and other pieces of infrastructure that are the domain of one specialized engineer. This could be how to restart or connect a legacy database to the main database, for example. If that one engineer takes a vacation, and the legacy database breaks, there is no way to fix it until the engineer returns. Everyone might appreciate the expertise, but it’s not a long-term solution.

Other knowledge siloes include redundant or overlapping systems, like the networking team using a proprietary, access-only monitoring tool, while the software development team uses a separate monitoring tool. Or, a knowledge silo could be documentation-related, such as when one team creates a new firewall rule, but doesn’t update the help desk about what the change means and how they need to work differently.

3. Abandoned projects

Unless your organization’s IT infrastructure was recently built from scratch, there are probably abandoned projects and initiatives taking up storage space (not to mention mental space) all across the company. An executive might have kicked off a data automation project to update and migrate old customer records, or a third-party vendor might have been onboarded to supposedly solve outdated systems issues. 

But the vendor’s promises never came to fruition, and the executive who championed the automation is long gone, moved to another division or company entirely. Without specific, direct ownership of projects like these, the software just piles onto other digital waste along with unused subscriptions or server space. And the problems that existed are still affecting employees’ daily work.

How IT can get healthier

Accumulating tech stacks on top of disjointed architectures can easily keep IT teams stuck. When the break-fix cycles just keep going, it’s hard to get out of them. That’s especially true when there’s no real will to change from leadership. These cycles are costly, too: engineers and IT staff spend about 33% of their time fixing internal IT disruptions and misconfigurations rather than building new products.

With so much coming at IT teams these days — pressure to work faster and more efficiently, AI infrastructure changes, and more — now is the time to fix what’s broken.

A healthy IT team isn’t just one that can close its tickets quickly without going over budget. It’s one that has the time and space to explore root causes to prevent common issues from happening in the first place. It’s a team that can tackle those knowledge siloes with support from company leaders, find and evaluate abandoned projects, and collaboratively build automation into the escalation path for straightforward access approvals and other basic tasks. 

How to start fixing IT

So where to begin to get IT teams out of the firefighter role? Take a look at what your skilled IT technicians are good at. Examine which tech debt, approval paths, or abandoned projects are costing money or taking up valuable infrastructure space. If your IT technicians had half of each work day freed up from fixing the same old issues, what would you ask them to work on?

You’ll likely find that incorporating AI capabilities can help offload some of what’s broken in IT. Instead of weekly user problems resolved, consider which problems could be permanently eliminated. Autonomous agentic AI is now sophisticated enough to solve user issues end-to-end. With AI assistance, teams can keep the knowledge base updated for every user to access. And each system gets a permanent IT owner who now has the time to keep it working well and measure its usefulness. Start with Robin by Atera, the agentic AI solution to see how other enterprises have made life better for IT teams.