The IT Skills Gap Meets Too Many Automation Tools

There have been several IT industry shifts within the last several years. The movement away from waterfall methodology toward Agile practices, as well as the shift to cloud-based applications, have transformed business requirements. As a result, IT departments risk falling behind, as they have to meet business demands while simultaneously handling day-to-day tasks using legacy tools.

Two key challenges have arisen from these sea changes. Fortunately, IT Automation solutions can help IT professionals free up valuable time to focus on innovation and more quickly respond to unexpected and critical problems.

IT Resource Gap

The proliferation of affordable servers and applications seems to be beneficial on the surface, but department managers and executives are sorely in need of people to run them. Demand for IT staff is outpacing supply, leading to a negative relationship between people and technology known as the IT Resource Gap.

IT professionals have found themselves courted by recruiters like never before. And when it comes to finding IT talent with the right skill set, competitors are stopping at nothing to offer these unavailable employees jobs at their organization.

The IT Skills Gap directly affects organizations’ ability to deliver IT services. Problems range from delayed delivery because of unfilled positions, loss of revenue, increased workload on existing staff, and adverse impacts on customer service. In fact, 25% of respondents in a recent survey launched by an online recruiting and job placement firm stated their company has suffered a loss in revenue due to unfilled positions. 

Too Many Automation Tools

Automation can help IT staff increase efficiency and save money, but using too many IT automation tools often creates its own set of problems.

Gartner states that organizations have between three to eight individual scheduling tools in their IT environment. Each tool requires a different skill set, which exacerbates IT resource gap.

The core value of workload automation is to help cover lacking skills in technology teams, but instead these siloed automation tools have added to the problem. Individual departments and developers have control over selecting their own solution, leading to disparate selections. This leaves organizations responsible for supporting a mix of different technologies that often don’t communicate together or even overlap. IT must bridge these solutions together by spending their time on custom scripting in a variety of different languages. And from a financial perspective, organizations are forced to spend countless dollars on multiple licensing fees and support.

Centralize IT Automation 

The goal of IT automation is to do more with less, but it’s near impossible to reach this goal when one organization is filled with siloed automation tools while lacking adequate staff to run them.

This is where taking a centralized approach to automation comes into play. Centralizing and consolidating your IT environment will not only take some of the workload off your IT staff (so they can focus on more innovative and mission-critical structural improvements) but it will also create a more agile organization moving forward.

For more information on how a central IT automation solution can streamline your organization, download our new eBook “Best Practices for Workload Automation in the Bimodal Era.”