The Hidden Costs of IT Issues

There is great potential for increasing the IT Happiness in the workplace. Research shows that you can easily increase the productivity, reduce the pressure on your IT Service Desk and save up on Information Technology costs. The obstacle to doing so usually arises because the IT management simply does not notice the missed opportunities.

Let’s put some numbers on this to visualise the potential.

Information Technology Pains in Numbers

Information Technology, IT, IT problems, Information technology costs

“Poorly functioning IT systems” together with “inadequate digital skills” result in huge losses of productivity, new research says. Let’s assume that we have 1,000 IT end users spending on average 20 hours/week using IT at an average cost of €30/hour (The Netherlands). According to the new research on IT-related loss of productivity, we have an average productivity loss of 7.6%, which in our case would cause an inefficiency of € 2.2 million yearly. Suppose we can bring this down from 7.6% to just 6% time loss. This reduction would already lead to a monetary value of € 460.800 productivity gain. Furthermore, workers spend more than 30 minutes of their work week taking care of computer issues or assisting a colleague with such.

Another research shows that every employee in a company encounters IT-related problems on average 1.7 times a week. Less skilled employees do so even more with 2.5 times a week. The time necessary to solve such a problem is approximately 35 minutes. While assisting a colleague sounds like a good thing, the lost productivity is enormous. Therefore, it translates into huge Information Technology costs for your company. Digitally capable workers “waste” a considerable amount of time helping the less digitally educated ones.

Gather Your IT Data

Besides the productivity loss, the IT Service Desk is affected as well. Imagine your company has 1,000 IT end users raising a ticket every month and your IT Service Desk is spending 5 minutes per ticket/call. Reducing the number of problems with 20% leads to a huge time saving of nearly 17 hours per month, which equals to 200 hours per year.

A certain amount of Information Technology issues will always be present, but reduction always pays off. There is an extreme potential IT gain to realize. Be sure you monitor what the most important problems are and how the end-users (try to) solve them. You can make use of existing data based on your Service Desk, SLA reports and the feedback from your end user (IT user satisfaction surveys).