One in three IT professionals experience high work pressure
Delft - Almost half of IT professionals (48%) are so busy with regular work that there is no time left to fix IT failures. Daily tasks such as facilitating well-functioning IT systems already take up too many hours. This is where IT professionals (80%) feel highly responsible: business continuity is the top priority for IT professionals. Many IT departments do not actually have time to solve issues such as a slow internet connection or jammed programmes. This figures TOPdesk, Service Management supplier, in a survey of 250 IT employees and more than 1,000 working Dutch people.
Workload in the IT department
A quarter of IT departments workers think the workload in the IT department is fine. Yet almost one in three IT professionals (28%) say they find the workload in the IT department (too) high. That pressure temporarily increases according to a third when a major IT failure occurs.
IT worker has a different image to colleagues on the shop floor
The shop floor and the IT department both believe that IT failures are part and parcel of digital life (65% and 87%). But both groups have a different experience when it comes to the frequency of IT failures. According to colleagues on the shop floor, IT failures occur almost never (31%) or only once a month (30%). To illustrate, only 19 per cent of IT professionals say that once a month, an outage occurs.
Thomas Burghart, Business Unit Director Central Government at TOPdesk: "IT is increasingly intertwined with almost all business processes these days. The effect of this is that IT failures have a greater impact on more and more colleagues. Another consequence is that finding the underlying cause of such a failure is becoming more complex. It is therefore not surprising that the workload in the IT department is increasing. There are simply more reports and they are also increasingly busy fixing those same disruptions.Fortunately, at the same time, we see that the self-reliance of the average employee is quite high, as they constantly have to deal with IT in both business and private life. Should companies doubt their team's self-reliance, it can be encouraged by creating manuals and knowledge items for recurring problems. If these can be found in a central location, employees can try to resolve a disruption themselves. This can take some of the pressure off the IT department."
About the survey
The survey was conducted between 28 March and 12 April 2023 via two separate online questionnaires; one intended for IT (co-)decision-makers and one for employees in departments other than IT. A total of 250 IT employees -and decision makers active in organisations with 25 to 500+ employees participated, in addition to 1,010 Dutch citizens (aged 18 to 67) working or wanting to work in organisations with 25 to 500+ employees. The survey was conducted by Markteffect on behalf of TOPdesk
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