With the advent of digital transformation, the role of the IT sector within companies is undergoing a major shift. If support professionals were responsible for fixing computers, today they are responsible for keeping the business running. This requires a new culture in IT management, which needs to be aligned with customer projects.
As technology solutions became the backbone of companies, the IT team’s working model had to be revised. Until then, the work pattern of support providers was reactive, now a more proactive and productive approach is needed.
In this article, we will understand the difference between reactive and proactive IT management, as well as what a company needs to move to the most modern standard. Check out!
After all, what is the difference between reactive and proactive IT management?
The reactive model focused on “putting out fires”, within the break/fix pattern, is no longer aligned with customer expectations. The focus is now on maintaining the high availability of the infrastructure, based on the proactive model, which requires two important factors: monitoring and automation.
What is reactive support and what are its impacts on customer productivity?
When the IT vendor defaults to reactive, problem-solving management, there are two initial impacts:
- The customer’s productivity is impaired: for each problem, regardless of type and intensity, there is a stop until it is resolved;
- IT support becomes related to problems, even if most of the time they are not the responsibility of the sector. At the end of the day, the support provider becomes the last person the customer wants to see upfront.
But the reactive model does not only have negative impacts on the customer. That’s because IT professionals base their work on visits, that is, they can only serve one customer at a time. Therefore, depending on the level of the problem, the service provider may need to cancel appointments with other customers, which generates wear and opens space for competition.
But why does the reactive management model cause these impacts? Because there is no anticipation, that is, continuous customer support.
What is proactive support and what are its impacts on customer productivity?
Proactive IT management stands as a problem avoider, anticipating them and creating automation mechanisms to act in specific situations. For this, ticket management and remote monitoring system are needed, capable of identifying vulnerabilities and failures so that these factors are resolved before generating problems for the customer.
It is worth noting that the management of tickets creates a record and reminds the professional to meet a certain demand, in addition to allowing the organization and hierarchy of tickets, which facilitates the performance of tasks according to priorities.
It is also possible to create a database that helps the professional to anticipate recurring problems and allows the manager to evaluate the team’s performance.
This all contributes to serving more than one customer at the same time, increasing business productivity and contributing to its sustainable scalability. Automation tools, such as patch updates and backups, also help to gain productivity, as they make scheduling activities more dynamic.
Should I 100% abandon the reactive model?
Although the proactive model should be the basis of work for a support provider that intends to stay alive in the market, it is necessary to understand that reactivity will continue to be part of the IT sector.
After all, as much as we monitor and automate the tasks of the sector, there are problems that do not arrive on time — and these are usually the ones that require the most efforts to resolve. Therefore, it is important that the team is also prepared for reactivity, but without making it the standard of IT management.
How to migrate between reactive and proactive IT in the company?
Now that you know the difference between reactive and proactive IT management, let’s go over some tips on how to make a good migration from the former to the latter. Follow up!
Implement a monitoring system
We already know that proactive IT relies on continuous monitoring of the environment. However, to achieve this efficiency, it is necessary to automate failure and vulnerability tracking routines.
It is this real-time evaluation capability, combined with automation, that allows the manager to monitor the team’s performance and even increase the workload, but without overloading the professionals. In other words, do more with less!
From there, when some type of malfunction occurs in a customer’s system, the support team can identify the source of the problem and anticipate the necessary measures to prevent its growth.
Automate the services
We talked a little in the topic above about automating fault detection, but it is important to know the usefulness of the service desk tool. Key to proactive management, it allows the support provider to automate bureaucratic and routine activities such as updates, spot adjustments, and periodic backups.
Automated processes are primarily responsible for the good uptime rate — an index that measures the availability of the customer’s IT infrastructure. Professionals set aside simpler tasks and can work in more complex situations.
This innovation also reduces the number of tickets for solving simple problems, which can be dealt with at the root.
Align the team to the new working model
Proactive IT management demands a team aligned with this purpose. In other words, it is important that professionals not only learn how to use monitoring and management tools but also know the importance of this model for client success. For this to be possible, it is necessary to create solid policies and recurrent training.
As we’ve seen, proactive IT management aligns support work with customer expectations. This is very important nowadays when corporations are increasingly dependent on information technology. In addition to bringing benefits to the customer, the proactive model benefits the IT vendor by giving them the ability to do more with a smaller team and schedule scalable growth.
