What defines a business-aligned IT department? A sure sign of one is when IT leadership has a place in the C-suite. CIOs, CTOs, CISOs — these positions exist because they bring indispensable and strategic value to the executive team. So why are so many IT departments stuck in the basement when they should have a seat in the boardroom?

Understanding why IT departments continue to get mired in day-to-day operations is the first step to addressing the broader issues that have relegated IT to the basement. They are too busy fighting the alligators to drain the swamp. Until IT can automate more of the mundane, day-to-day operations, they will never have the opportunity to secure a much-needed seat in the boardroom.

HDI’s 2015 support center best practices and salary report noted that IT help desk ticket volumes increased in 63% of support organizations surveyed. Basic troubleshooting tasks constituted 56% of the tickets, taking up 73% of their time. This shows that IT is being crushed with routine maintenance, leaving it little time to contribute strategic value to the business. 

Simply put, IT shouldn’t be this hard — and it doesn’t need to be.

Automation of routine tasks

Organizations won’t be able to see the true value of their IT teams until staff are made more accessible, more visible, and more available to deliver services beyond those required to "keep the lights on." The key here is increased automation. When processes are automated, IT personnel have a greater opportunity to improve systems, deliver a broader set of services, and engage with business users in a more meaningful way.

Perhaps most importantly, when enterprise technology offers freedom from unnecessary overhead, the IT department can apply its skill set to solving business problems — instead of just solving IT problems. IT staff and technical resources who are currently spending all their time trying to make solutions simply work can begin innovating in ways that accelerate organizational purpose and move the business forward.

Version upgrades and the tabula rasa effect

A significant factor keeping IT in the basement is the persistence of legacy systems. The time and opportunity costs associated with maintaining, upgrading, customizing, configuring and troubleshooting the day-to-day issues relating to aging hardware and software systems is enormous and often overwhelms IT staff — as well as the programmers tasked with managing the code base.

Gartner research says that 70% of IT spending is related to run-the-business costs, while only 19% is spent on growth, and a mere 11% is dedicated to transformation. In the federal government, the numbers are worse. Former federal CIO Tony Scott’s often repeated mantra of "flipping the 80/20," refers to the fact that 80% of federal IT spending goes toward maintaining and operating legacy systems, while only 20% is applied to innovation.

It’s hard enough to find the right technology to tackle unique and ever-changing business needs, and the odds that the vendor got the program exactly right for a specific need are practically zero. Customization and user-defined configurations are a must to unlock a tool’s business value.

But here’s the problem: with most solutions, customizations are built on top of the current version of the software. When software is upgraded, the foundation upon which the organization built its customizations is removed and the new foundation may not be able to support them. All the hard work an organization put into making that system its own can go away in a heartbeat — clean slate — tabula rasa.

All of this has led to what one InformationWeek study revealed: "One way businesses are coping with the challenge of upgrading and optimizing enterprise applications is to avoid customizations."

IT solutions must therefore be "friction-less," meaning they are not only easy to implement and maintain, but they can be seamlessly upgraded from one version to the next. Custom technology should grow and evolve with an organization, not be rebuilt (or become obsolete) every time a new version of the underlying software is released.

Product integration

IT organizations that can overcome legacy issues are often met with a new set of challenges when trying to integrate new technology with their existing systems, to introduce single-pane-of-glass visibility, enhanced capabilities for end-users, or improved service delivery. The time, resources, and expertise available to properly integrate new systems are often extremely limited, which impedes forward progress and further limits IT’s ability to function as a strategic partner. Integration can also lead to new complications. The 2015 HDI report also pointed out that the number one reason for increased ticket volume was the implementation of new applications and systems.

Make no mistake: the future of IT is in integration and Interoperability. All too often, integrations are considered one-off customizations. But what happens when software product A’s upgrade breaks the connection to software product B?

No single vendor’s solution can be everything to everyone or do everything well. The good news is that through strategic partnerships, many vendors integrate the strengths of other technologies to create better, and future-ready, solutions for customers.

Given the accelerating pace at which new innovations are entering the market — like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and ambient user interfaces to name a few — we must embrace platforms that not only permit seamless integration of these advances, but also amplify their utility. This means investing in future-ready systems that make it easy to incorporate best-of-breed solutions, instead of trying to compete with them.

Smart IT administrators need to make ease of integration a priority when evaluating and selecting technology vendors.

What does the future hold?

Advances in technology revolutionize the way business is done. But for many organizations, these advances have introduced barriers that, in practice, have both directly and indirectly led to the failure of IT to live up to its potential. While operations today seem light-years ahead of where they were just 25 years ago, the capability for IT to be a strategic asset that drives organizations forward has barely been tapped.

But to reap these rewards, IT must first be seen by the C-suite as an enabler, and not just overhead. By making smart technology decisions today, IT decision-makers will be able to provide those in the board room a glimpse of the transformational power that IT can bring to the table – not in the basement, but in the boardroom itself.