IT department struggling to stay on budget? Avoid overspending with monitoring tools
Are frequent software updates and the growing number of digital tools putting increasing pressure on your budget? This is the first hint your IT department may be struggling.
The mounting number of digital tools and licenses is called software sprawl. It happens when employees try to find new tools to improve their efficiency.
But every added tool is also an added expense, and many of the tools are not scalable or officially approved. In addition, the updates for tools are also becoming more and more costly.
SaaS sprawl can bottleneck your IT department, burn out your employees, and seriously drain your company's budget.
Are you prepared to help your IT department regain control over its costs and tech stack?
Major Challenges That Your IT Department Faces
Due to a heavy dependence upon digital tools in all departments, the IT team is becoming responsible for a longer list of tasks.
If you don't help them get a full grasp of their responsibilities, your company may soon experience a range of problems, starting from security breaches to poor resource planning:
Insider Threats
According to Security Boulevard, around 60% of organizations were faced with one or more insider attacks in 2022. This trend continues and represents a serious productivity and financial issue for numerous companies. Insider threats can cause the greatest financial loss and competitive edge reduction of all cyber attacks because they expose critical data that are hard to access for external attackers.
What's at stake? Without the right strategies and tools, the company remains vulnerable to internal security threats. For example, phishing attacks in 2022 cost $4.91 million, while damage from malicious insiders resulted in $4.18 million.
Managing Compliance Reports & Audits
Generation of compliance reports is among the IT department's responsibilities and can be highly time and resource-consuming. For GDPR alone, maintaining continuous compliance requires constant monitoring of all departments. This includes activities such as updating data processing policies, conducting data inventories, and managing data breach responses.
What's at stake? The lack of proper automation exacerbates the issue and leads to excessive manual labor. Despite available specialized tools, this problem affects 67% of organizations. They report involving at least 25 employees in these processes, further escalating time and resource consumption.
Software Sprawl
Software, or tech sprawl is the uncontrolled expansion of software and technology solutions within an organization. It has become a prevalent issue in recent years since many businesses lack the tools or insights needed to track and manage it. This leads to substantial inefficiencies, cost overruns, and burnout in the IT departments due to this phenomenon.
What's at stake? The average company wastes around $135,000 annually on unused SaaS tools alone. This is primarily due to underutilized software licenses, duplicate applications, and auto-renewals that go unchecked.
Automation Initiatives
With the exponential development of technology, it is clear that a significant portion of tasks in the current workplace can be automated. The automation potential extends across data entry, document creation, and administrative processes. McKinsey estimates that for 60% of active jobs in the US, 30% of work activities can be automated​.
What's at stake? Your IT department's process improvement suggestions can save your team a day and a half of manual labor per week. Ignoring them means keeping your employees busy with manual instead of strategic tasks and forgoing an opportunity to boost your company's
productivity and efficiency.
Workforce Planning
Employee performance data enables efficient allocation of resources and project planning, so IT professionals are among key players in workforce planning. However, many companies don't have in their tech stack proper software that would enable the IT team to collect crucial info and predict potential bottlenecks.
What's at stake? Poor workforce planning data contribute directly to mismanagement and bad decision-making, ultimately affecting the entire organization. On average, 12% of project budgets are wasted due to inefficiencies stemming from poor management decisions. This equates to $122 million wasted for every $1 billion invested in projects.
5 Ways Employee Monitoring Software Increases IT Efficiency
Your IT department's efficiency in dealing with all incoming tasks considerably depends on its tech stack.
Employee monitoring software, such as Insightful, may be the tool your IT team has been missing. While it may seem counterintuitive to add another software to your list of monthly subscriptions, there is a catch!
This tool enables your IT professionals to identify all unused or unapproved software and licenses. Nexthink reports that these exact costs lead to a waste of $45 million every month. By pinpointing junk apps, a worker monitoring app can actually help your organization significantly reduce monthly license costs.
This is just one feature of this platform that can help your organization eliminate all the expensive inefficiencies affecting your entire organization.
Its insider threat detection feature prevents costly data breaches in a matter of seconds thanks to the real-time tracking of all employee activities. Constant monitoring also enables minute assessments of employee and resource utilization. This allows optimal workforce planning and helps you avoid expensive under or overstaffing issues.
In addition, detailed employee computer tracking enables you to easily spot processes that should be automated to reduce time waste and improve productivity. Thorough monitoring and automatic data collection are also the basis for effortless compliance report generation that saves hours of work.
1. Optimize Software Usage & Reduce Costs
The Problem: Tech Sprawl Is Hard to Recognize
When software sprawl takes over, the problem surpasses the boundaries of the IT departments. It becomes an issue affecting the company's budget and the overall security of the data system.
To tackle tech sprawl within your organization, you first need to assess its level, which is almost impossible to do manually. Employee computer monitoring software can help you do it efficiently and immediately come up with a plan for action.
The Solution: Identifying Underused Applications
This tool tracks which software and apps your employees across the company use. That way it enables your IT team to identify redundant or seldom-used programs. Armed with this insight, you can immediately cancel all unnecessary applications and licenses. By doing so, you will curb tech sprawl, reduce costs, and fine-tune your company's software ecosystem.
The software also identifies tools that drive the most productivity and enables your IT department to distinguish between the essential software and the apps that are predominantly distracting. This ensures that resources are channeled into tools that truly elevate efficiency and business performance.
2. Strengthen Data Security & Mitigate Insider Threats
The Problem: Insider Threats Are on the Rise
The number of security breaches is on the rise in the last couple of years, but even more concerning is the number of insider threats.
Your IT department can work on educating your employees in an effort to reduce the number of phishing accidents. This, however, does not guarantee that people who have been trained won't still make mistakes. This strategy also leaves significant room for intentional internal as well as external threats.
That is why the key is providing your IT professionals with a powerful tool that will help them protect your entire data system. One of the best solutions to this problem is robust employee tracking software with insider threat detection tools like Insightful.
The Solution: Insider Threat Detection
Besides monitoring employees' daily focus on tasks, this tool also allows real-time tallying of all other employee computer activities. This includes any risky online behaviors that can inadvertently give malicious software access to company computers. At the same time, this tracking app detects unauthorized access to any parts of your data system and identifies the person and the document they have accessed.
The minute any threat is detected, employee tracking software sends a notification to your IT team. This way it enables them to react immediately and prevent any damage from occurring.
Don't worry—your employees don't have to work on-site to be tracked for potential security breaches. Once you have this app up and running on your company computers, you will gain visibility into all your employees' actions regardless of their location. This way you can maintain security across your organization, including your remote and hybrid teams.
3. Automate Compliance Reporting & Auditing
The Problem: Compliance Reports Produce Extra Workload
Every company has requirements for a different set of compliance reports. There are large-scale reports, like the GDPR report that is required by EU law and the AICPA SOC 2 report that is defined on the federal US level. Then, there are compliance reports for external auditors, board members, and business partners.
All of these reports have one thing in common: they need a lot of work, and can often consume excessive amounts of time.
To make this process more efficient, your first aim should be automating data collection. This is where employee monitoring software can do a great job for you.
The Solution: Data Collection & Report Generation Automation
These tools collect detailed logs of employee activities and thus significantly reduce the amount of manual work your employees need to go through. They also offer the possibility of automatically generating compliance reports so that your team can avoid putting in extra hours and staff on these tasks.
While collecting detailed data and generating in-depth reports, this software also takes care of your employees', clients', and business partners' data privacy. Its comprehensive set of options lets you choose the type of data you want to leave out of tracking. For example, you can cancel screenshots in private messaging apps or on websites, like online banking, that require sharing personal data. Keystrokes are never tracked, as this practice threatens employee privacy many times.
4. Identify Other Opportunities for Automation
The Problem: Manual Tasks Cause Time Waste
Repetitive manual tasks slow down workflows and consume valuable time. By identifying and automating them, IT departments can streamline operations and free up employees to focus on more impactful work.
Yet, identifying automation opportunities is challenging without clear visibility into everyday workflows.
The Solution: Detecting Automation Opportunities
Insightful's employee activity tracker provides your IT team with valuable insights into every task your employees do during their shifts. Another useful feature this platform offers is its app and website usage tracker that shows how your employees interact with various apps.
By combining these two sets of data, your IT staff can shine the light on the repetitive manual tasks that can and should be automated.
The next step is optimizing workflows across the organization by removing low-value manual tasks from your employees' plates. To do this, help your IT team to choose and implement the optimal automation tools. This will allow everyone in your organization to focus on more strategic initiatives that drive business growth.
By streamlining business processes in this way, you can both enhance operational efficiency and contribute to long-term productivity improvements.
5. Enhance IT's Role in Workforce Planning
The Problem: Workforce Planning Requires Detailed Data
IT teams are expected to facilitate more efficient workforce planning by providing valuable insight into the overall employee performance and how technology impacts it.
However, they cannot analyze where inefficiencies lie and how tools are used without the help of robust software.
The Solution: Relying on Capacity Monitoring Tool
A workforce capacity monitoring tool, such as Insightful, is among the best solutions. This tool allows IT teams to track your company's workforce capacity in real time. It can also offer you and the rest of the management precise insights into the health of your resource management. This will help you make informed decisions about workload distribution and capacity planning.
Thanks to real-time visibility into the utilization of each digital tool, you can continuously track and optimize resource allocation and ensure it's in line with the current demands.
In addition, this platform's predictive insights powered by integrations like BI tools like BigQuery, PowerBI, Tableau, and Looker help IT teams forecast future needs by analyzing employee interactions with systems and tools. As the company grows, this data-driven approach ensures that technology scales efficiently, allowing optimal distribution of resources.
This proactive planning helps prevent bottlenecks and ensures that both technology and personnel are optimally aligned for success.
Conclusion
As IT spending grows, the key to maintaining your IT department fully efficient is to provide them with a set of cost-effective and robust tools.
By enhancing visibility and improving planning, Insightful employee tracking software empowers IT professionals to better support company growth and streamline operations.
Take the next step in boosting your business efficiency! Start your free trial today and see how this employee monitoring tool can transform your IT strategy.
