How many IT professionals does it take to fix an issue?

The answer is five, working a combined average of 100 hours a week to fix unexpected IT issues, proving why IT continues to focus on efficiency.

One IT professional averages 20 unexpected issues per week, putting out fires such as dealing with network slowdowns/outages, poor performing applications, unanticipated change requests, or equipment failures according to a survey by independent market research firm Kelton Research commissioned by TeamQuest Corporation.

Daily business hiccups affect the efficiency and productivity of IT. Dynamic IT environments demand that IT use its resources wisely as business leaders focus on exploiting the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization to better serve customers and boost profitability.

One of the presumed benefits of the cloud is freeing IT staff to work on strategic initiatives such as planning for cloud initiatives or understanding the risks associated with BYOD. However, with 30% of an IT organization's time spent on maintenance and mundane tasks, companies too often compensate by over-provisioning, wasting energy and money. IT is faced with a growing service demand from the business and consumers.

“From a service delivery view, IT staff deal with differing capacity requirements from different business units,” said TeamQuest Director of Product Management, Scott Adams. “And the only constant is that those requirements are always changing.”

“To increase efficiency, IT needs to institute mature capacity management processes that will protect against over-provisioning and reduce or eliminate the number of IT issues,” Adams added.