Combating IT burnout:
A tech-led approach for overworked service desks

There are several core stressors and bottlenecks that might be putting your IT technicians on the path to burnout. Some of them are:

1. High-volume monotony: Repetitive L1 tickets and ticket management

With enterprises expanding their operations and relying more on IT to digitize their internal operations, service desks are experiencing a surge in the most mundane tickets, like:

• Password resets.
• VPN access.
• Software requests.

Added to these tickets are the usual administration tasks like routing tickets to the right personnel, updating their status, and keeping all stakeholders in the loop. Ticket handling and ticket administration—when both of these spectrums of IT service desk operations are performed manually, it drains your workforce and leads to burnout.

2. High-stakes gamble: Major incidents, IT service delivery, and change implementations

When "always-on" is the mantra for business success, major outages are a no-go, and the pressure is on incident response teams to act swiftly. The same expectation is levied on IT service delivery managers during projects like large-scale employee onboarding and offboarding. IT changes are expected to cause minimal friction and need to be properly planned, approved by the right change advisory board, and implemented meticulously.

As the modern adage goes, “When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.” When all of these ITSM operations are marked high priority, and performed without a structured approach or any level of automation, they can cause burnout among your IT specialists—even veterans of the trade.

3. The swivel-chair problem: Juggling multiple tools, leading to cognitive overload

When all your IT systems are fragmented across a hybrid IT landscape, IT technicians and support engineers tab-hop between multiple apps and dashboards to firefight incidents and deliver IT services. During an ERP outage, technicians juggle observability tools, the ITSM platform, and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams; or while handling employee onboarding and offboarding, they juggle UEM and IAM solutions while coordinating with HR, facilities, and finance teams.

4. The people factor: Bottlenecks in hiring and skilling initiatives

Beyond these operational causes, there are several people-centric issues that can result in service desk burnout. Most ITSM teams are lean in numbers, expected to handle a large volume of tickets, and insufficiently trained and overworked, without access to the resources they need to resolve tickets.

Understaffing relative to service demands creates an unsustainable workload for service desk teams. Skill gaps create bottlenecks for specialized issues when certain team members are the only technicians who can resolve a class of tickets. Inadequate training on new technologies or processes leaves staff feeling unprepared and stressed. While these problems cannot directly be addressed through technological means, there are effective ways of solving people-centric issues as well.

When the most mundane, time-consuming activities and critical workloads are automated, technicians can concentrate on higher-level tasks. This reduces the toll that working at an IT service desk can create.

Eliminating repetitive toil with rule-based automations and AI

Rule-based automations are low-hanging fruit when it comes to ITSM platforms. Here are some examples of what they can be set up to perform:

• Assigning tickets to the right technicians with quota thresholds so they're not overloaded.
• Automating the notification mechanism.
• Triggering SLA-based escalations.

But it gets better. Advancements in AI-driven ITSM can help offload everything from triaging and routing tickets to the right technicians to clustering incidents and identifying problems with ML-driven algorithms. IT service desks can now leverage GenAI to level up knowledge management by sharing summarized excerpts of private knowledge base articles and simultaneously improve and expedite service desk communication. Here are some AI capabilities that can help prevent burnout caused by L1 tickets:

• RAG powered knowledge discovery: Chatbots within ITSM platforms utilize retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models to understand an end-user query, fetch the relevant KB articles, feed them to an LLM, and then summarize it with citations to a private KB repository.

• Intelligent conversational workflows: Simple service requests, like access requests or password resets, can be automated end-to-end by letting a GenAI-powered virtual agent identify the intent of the end-user using natural language understanding and trigger the right workflows to resolve the ticket without any kind of manual intervention.

The convergence of conversational, generative, and predictive AI doesn't just prevent IT burnout; it transforms the everyday work of your IT technicians in a way that frees them from daily tedium, leading to elevated productivity and lower burnout.

Orchestrating incident responses and service delivery

Advanced workflow automations put service delivery and incident responses on autopilot, drastically reducing the need for manual supervision. For example, employee onboarding and offboarding form the bulk of service requests and can be completely automated. This typically involves working with multiple teams like HR, facilities, and payroll, synchronizing tasks between technicians across instances. By creating an onboarding workflow and setting up the right automations, these tickets can be handled with the least amount of technician intervention.

Instead of communicating with each technician individually, an onboarding workflow can orchestrate actions like:

• Creating an AD user account.
• Triggering notifications to stakeholders.
• Initiating the contract signing process through an e-signature tool.
• Adding that user into a facilities database.
• Assigning and provisioning their assets.

This sets up a standard operating procedure on a class of tickets, cumulatively reducing the toil. The same approach can be adopted for responding to major incidents like security breaches, where the initial containment measures such as locking down AD accounts, rotating passwords, and wiping corporate data on endpoints can be automated.

ITSM platforms as the connective tissue for your IT

When dealing with tickets that require deep context or information about devices, IT service desk technicians typically need to look up the IT asset inventory. An ITSM platform that offers ITAM and CMDB capabilities natively, reduces tab-hopping for technicians and the licensing costs for the organization. Also, ITSM platforms can be readily integrated with UEM solutions, enabling quick responses to incidents and rapid provisioning of software requests within a single console.

Integrating with observability tools help service desks identify early warning signs of a major incident, like memory issues on a critical server or anomalous traffic through a network router. Alarms can be automatically logged as incidents and escalated to the right specialists even before an outage occurs. These contextual IT integrations ensure that cross-functional context is carried into the ITSM platform, eliminating the need to multitask across apps and reducing cognitive overload.