Keys to a highly-efficient IT department

The first step toward a high-performing IT department is communication. If the business and the IT department aren't on the same page, IT ends up building solutions for problems the business doesn't have, and missing the ones it does.

Proper communication goes beyond simply speaking with the business units. Often, the IT department and the business don't even use the same vocabulary.

In the technology field, you're constantly bombarded with the latest and greatest devices and software. Unfortunately, that often leads to backwards problem-solving: We discover some shiny new technology, then go looking for problems it can address. That approach ends in failure.

Does that mean new technology isn't the answer? Not at all. Outdated technology itself frequently holds an IT department back. Tied to outdated enterprise software, the IT department spends most of its time and energy keeping the lights on. The maintenance requirements and inflexibility of the old system handcuff the team and keep them from providing the business with modern solutions.

The key point: While new technology can address many of the issues facing IT departments, keep your focus in the right place. Technology for technology's sake is rarely a good idea. Start with the company's most pressing problems and seek out technology to fix them. That approach may not always involve the latest and greatest tech, but it vastly improves your chances of success.

There's a distinction often attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: "People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives."

It's an important point that gets lost in the shuffle. Some managers take an "I'm in charge, so you'll do as I say" approach. It might deliver short-term results, but it doesn't foster long-term motivation, and it certainly doesn't create a high-performing staff. The best leaders understand the importance of a committed team and treat their employees with respect.

This isn't just someone's opinion. Research backs it up. A study led by Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School, concluded that "human happiness has large and positive causal effects on productivity." How large? The same research found unhappy workers were about 10% less productive, while happy workers were about 12% more productive. That's a swing of roughly 22% riding on how you treat your team.

This wastes time on two fronts.

First, rewriting applications that work just fine is usually a waste of time. Besides the satisfaction of building the application from scratch, what value does it deliver? Unless the old application is holding your company or customers back in some way, developers should focus their attention on other tasks.

Second, writing or rewriting any application from scratch these days is a waste of time, full stop. There's simply too much good tooling available to justify re-inventing the wheel on every project.

It's not that reporting isn't necessary. It's absolutely essential. The problem is that IT departments pour time and energy into a task that can easily be automated or turned over to the end users. Here's a story that illustrates the point nicely, from Oli Thordarson, CEO of Alvaka Networks:

Two big lessons sit inside that story.

First, without proper communication, the time-wasting cycle would never have been caught. It's easy to keep performing a task because "that's what we've always done." Maybe an executive asked for a weekly report a few years back, and you're still delivering it to this day. It might be time to circle back and make sure anyone still reads it.

Second, a reporting portal is a great solution to end-user reporting problems. Set up a secure area on your intranet where employees can log in and access their reports whenever they need them. Users get their data instantly, and IT escapes the treadmill of repetitive reporting requests.

The research on multitasking keeps arriving at the same conclusion: It kills productivity. Our brains can only focus on a single task at a time, and they struggle to switch from one task to another. How much does it hurt? Studies on task-switching have put the productivity cost as high as 40%. Switch between tasks all day, and you can waste close to half your time on the switching itself.

The same applies to IT projects. Bouncing between projects strains productivity, yet many IT departments try to run several at once with the same people. The result is higher cost and lower quality.

Summary

Forrester Research once noted that 70% of the companies on the Fortune 1,000 list a decade earlier had vanished, and pointed to one core reason: An inability to adapt to change.

As technology evolves, business agility beats size. More and more, the ability to adapt to change is critical to a company's success. From a technology perspective, that means IT departments must evolve too. Maintaining the status quo is no longer good enough. IT must break out of the back-office stigma and establish itself as a business driver rather than a business supporter. How? Build these six habits:

• Get on the same page with the business: IT cannot deliver effective business solutions without constant communication with the business.
• Adopt a startup mentality: Devote most of your time to tasks that drive value, and a minimum viable effort to keeping the lights on.
• Keep your focus in the right place: Avoid the "technology for technology's sake" trap. Adopt technology that solves business problems.
• Keep learning: Constantly hone your skills, then apply those skills in the business.
• Treat your staff well: You're only as good as your team, so treat them accordingly.
• Put the right tools in place: You can't drive the business forward with outdated legacy tools. Give your staff the tools they need to succeed.

At the same time, abandon the six practices that waste time and energy:

• Writing (or rewriting) applications from scratch: With the frameworks and tools available today, coding applications from scratch is generally a waste of time.
• Repeating low-level, manual tasks: Roughly a third of IT's time goes to low-level manual work that can be automated.
• Creating reports for end users and executives: Give end users self-service options to create and manage their own reports.
• Manual quality assurance: Manual QA doesn't scale. Automated testing frees developer time and speeds up delivery.
• Juggling multiple projects at once: Jumping between projects wastes time and drastically reduces productivity.
• Individual desktop support: Shift to remote support and virtual desktops, and free up your support staff's time.

As technology becomes increasingly important, IT departments face a great opportunity. They are in a prime position to take their technology knowledge and drive the business forward. Those that follow the points above will position themselves to do just that.

White paper updated July 2026