Much has been written in recent years on the subject of a shortfall in the availability of skilled IT professionals to meet increasing demands. While it may be the case, I would argue that the real problem is not a lack of available talent but a poor and ineffective use of IT skills across the majority of IT departments.

To reinforce that opinion, IPsoft recently conducted some research amongst UK IT decision makers which identified a worrying trend. It seems that in many cases IT professionals are spending almost a third of their time on low level IT tasks for which they are over-qualified, and which could be far more effectively managed. The research recognised clear neglect of critical, often expensively-gained, skills and expertise, with those surveyed admitting that on a regular basis their staff only use about half (47%) of their applicable qualifications. With overqualified staff delivering simple, often mundane tasks, valuable skills are quickly lost through underuse, motivation levels drop rapidly, and the potential for error creep up.

While IT managers expressed concern about this situation (74% of those surveyed revealed a major frustration with the level of time dedicated to low level IT tasks) they did not necessarily understand how to address the challenge. A significant and recurring outcome was the availability of staff to support innovation and change initiatives. For many IT departments, too much time spent on “run the business” activities hampers their ability to drive “change the business” initiatives, many of which are aimed as using IT as a business differentiator and are thus infinitely more valuable to a business than the engine room of keeping systems and services running.

Perhaps the most alarming fact to come out of our research was that 88% of respondents felt resigned to the fact that wastage of skills is a necessary inconvenience. They accepted that to make progress in an enterprise IT environment, IT operations staff will have to perform day-to-day tasks for which they are over-qualified. That’s worrying, because it simply needn’t be the case.

Today, for example, expert systems are capable of automating on average over 50% of IT support incidents. Not just discrete tasks, or steps in a process, but end to end activities from the detection of an event or the receipt of a request, through the evaluation and diagnosis of the requirement, the execution of a remediation, the validation of success, and the notification or escalation as appropriate. IT leaders who embrace the potential of automation will find that they have at their disposal a greater pool of skilled staff, better motivated, more engaged, and fundamentally better equipped to use their talents to drive innovation and change.