Organizations often don’t measure the cost of IT inefficiency, but it can be huge

IT inefficiencies, including slow help desk support, cost many enterprises millions of dollars annually, with many employees and IT leaders even reporting multiple lost hours per week, according to a new survey.

While it’s no surprise that help desk delays and other IT inefficiencies are common and expensive, the survey for AI-driven help desk provider Atera puts recent numbers to the problem.

It finds that more than two-thirds of employees spend at least 10% of their day on so-called meta work, such as navigating processes, re-logging issues, and resolving technical difficulties. Nearly two-thirds lose at least 10 minutes a day to stalled IT systems, and in many cases, these delays cost their companies more than $100 per employee per week.

For an enterprise with thousands of employees, those costs can add up quickly.

IT leaders aren’t immune. Nearly three-quarters of them say they lose an average of at least one hour a week to issues such as access trouble, slow systems, approval delays, or slow IT fixes.

On average, an employee loses about three and a half hours of work time after filing a help desk request, notes Gil Pekelman, CEO and cofounder of IT management platform Atera. “There’s the time from when he opens a ticket until somebody gets back to him,” he says. “There’s the resolution time, and there’s the switching cost for the employee. He was working on something, he now moves to something else, and he now has to come back.”

Ignored costs

While Atera commissioned the survey to promote its AI-powered help desk solution, other IT experts say the survey numbers may be conservative. Most organizations underestimate the costs of IT inefficiency, says Collin Hogue-Spears, senior director and distinguished technical expert at app security provider Black Duck Software.

While many large enterprises carry the equivalent of 200-plus employees in lost productivity from IT friction, the cost doesn’t appear on a single budget line, he says.

“The numbers in this study track with what I see across enterprise environments,” he adds. “The real failure isn’t that friction exists but that most finance teams have never been asked to look at it.”

IT leaders should deploy digital experience measurement tools and compile quarterly reviews, he recommends. “If your CFO reviews headcount every quarter but has never seen a friction score, you’re funding a ghost workforce and calling it overhead,” Hogue-Spears says. “IT friction isn’t a cost center. It’s a ghost headcount.”

Some IT friction is inevitable, with enterprise scale often compounding the problem, he adds. Compliance requirements, multi-cloud environments, and other complex deployments add to the problem.

“Good CIOs shrink the tax; nobody repeals it,” he says. “Organizations with strong digital experiences report measurably less productivity loss than organizations without them, and that gap proves leadership matters.”

The myth of perfection

Some IT inefficiencies are necessary, adds Frank Meltke, CEO of digital transformation consulting firm contraco. “Zero-friction IT is an illusion,” he says. “A completely frictionless environment is, if it exists, an unsecure or wildly expensive one.”

Strong security protocols and compliance requirements introduce some level of meta work, he says. “The study is measuring real friction, but it’s not separating necessary friction from unnecessary friction,” he adds. “A successful IT leader doesn’t aim to eliminate all friction. The goal is to ensure the processes in place exist to protect the organization.”

While some IT friction is inevitable, the problem hits hardest at SMBs, Meltke notes. The Atera survey covers 1,000 full-time employees and 500 C-Suite and senior enterprise leaders at US companies with more than 1,000 employees, but surveying smaller organizations might show an even bigger problem, he adds.

“While an enterprise employee might lose 45 minutes waiting on a help desk ticket, an SMB employee loses that time or even more trying to fix the problem themselves,” he says.

The situation is even worse for a one-person business. “The math is brutal,” Meltke says. “You’re the CEO, execution team, and the IT department. Every minute spent formatting a document, fighting with an email integration, or manually tagging a task is a minute stolen directly from revenue generation.”

Meltke recommends that smaller organizations keep their IT setups simple. “Rather than cobbling together a dozen cheap, single-function apps that require constant maintenance and manual data entry, the focus should be on a very small number of highly capable, reliable tools,” he says. “A single premium platform that handles CRM, invoicing, and scheduling will dramatically outperform a fragmented stack of five free tools.”

AI to the rescue?

In addition, AI-powered help desk services can help speed up responses and get employees back to productivity faster, some experts say. AI can’t yet help with governance-related friction, but it can automate some help desk functions, Meltke says.

“Automated helpdesk tools handle repetitive tier-one issues, password resets, access requests, and known error patterns very well, and they do it faster than any human queue,” he adds. “For organizations processing high volumes of routine tickets, that’s a real and measurable gain.”

Atera’s Pekelman also makes a case for AI-enabled help desk services, saying they can cut response time from hours to minutes. AI can also help companies struggling to find qualified IT professionals, he says.

“The one thing we’re seeing in the market is that good IT people are very scarce,” he says. “But by using AI, they’re freed up to do projects they couldn’t do before and were very important to the company.”