Learn how to Spend less time on routine tasks and more time on your innovation

Would recovering 20-30% time in your day by spending less time on routine operations and break / fix activities interest you? Sure. Who wouldn’t be interested? The big question is how. While it’s an all too familiar story, businesses tell us that shifting resources from operations to innovation is still one of their biggest challenges.

A need for continued IT investment is one factor. A recent Information Week survey found that while IT has excelled at achieving cost-efficiency, there’s a downside. The focus on efficiency might have devalued IT in the eyes of the rest of the organization. According to the article, only 32% of IT respondents reported that IT plays an extremely important role in business innovation. Only 25% of non-IT respondents thought so.

Increased automation is also important. IT solutions, such as HP ProLiant Gen8 servers and the recently announced HP Converged Storage portfolio, are delivering tremendous automation that’s shifting the balance towards innovation.

However, the newly released, IDC Market Spotlight: Benefits of IT Training and Certification (January 2013), sponsored by HP, shows that IT skills can play a big role in turning the tide on the operations vs. innovation problem. The spotlight shows that skilled teams spend a lot less time on operations. That means they have more time to drive innovations through new IT solutions that increase business competitiveness and accelerate performance.

IDC found that:

• High performing archiving and retrieval teams spend 28% less time “fixing” problems
• High performing data backup and recovery teams spend 21% less time “fixing” problems
• Teams managing endpoint security solutions have 20% more time to spend helping end users

In fact, IDC stated that certifying the skills of IT staff members is the single biggest predictor of IT project success. That’s a bold statement.

So what does that mean for you? It means that skills development could be one of the most important things you can do to break out of the operations and break / fix trap.

Read the report to learn more about the impact of team skill on IT project success, and how business can move beyond operations and cost-efficiency to become a source of organizational innovation.