IT is one of the spokes that keeps your business’s wheels turning, serving all employees company-wide. They constantly receive crucial information—text data, audio data, and video data, etc—that can easily get lost in inboxes, files, and spreadsheets. To effectively manage operations, IT needs to easily communicate with employees, receive and track updates, tickets, and data from one central location, and scale their operations as the business grows.
This sounds daunting, but the good news is that there are robust softwares, like a Work OS, that can streamline IT workflows and help to unify them with the entire organization to keep them running smoothly.
Get started In this blog, we’ll cover:
- The term Work OS and what it means
- The key functions of a Work OS
- A background on IT and their main challenges
- What makes monday.com Work OS ideal for IT teams
- Customer spotlight: how a professional sports league successfully used monday.com to streamline their IT department
Let’s get to it.
A quick refresher- what’s monday.com Work OS?
monday.com is a Work Operating System (Work OS), aka a fully customizable work management platform where teams can build any workflow or solution they need. A Work OS is especially helpful when several teams need to communicate with each other and request materials, software, track information, or keep everyone in the loop.
There are a few components necessary for teams to get the most out of the management software. We’ve outlined a few critical capabilities of a Work OS below:
What are the key functions of a Work OS?
- Automations – Leave repetitive tasks to your Work OS while you focus on what’s important. Automations allow team members to choose a recipe (made up of a trigger and an action) and customize it to their needs. For instance, IT may want an automated workflow that notifies them every time a team completes a vetting process for a new technology.
- Integrations – Integrations bring all the tools teams use into one workspace. From email to calendars (and lots in between), IT can choose a platform, add parameters, and select an automation recipe. For an IT team, this could mean creating a recipe that inputs a new item on the board every time they receive an email request.
- No-code/ low-code functionality – A Work OS should have no-code-low-code capabilities so that any team is empowered to create solutions that work for their specific needs. For monday.com Work OS, the no-code/low-code capabilities are made up of building blocks, such as integrations, automations, forms, views, data visualizations, and dashboard widgets that require minimal (or no) coding. No-code/ low-code is especially helpful for IT teams because when sales needs a CRM for instance, they can build it themselves and save IT time and resources.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of a Work OS, let’s dive into IT’s role within the company and why a Work OS is so important for them.
What is IT and how does it contribute to a company’s success?
IT (Information Technology) goes beyond fixing computers. The department is at the center of the company’s tech strategy; they manage security risks, oversee tech operations, maintain systems and operations, look for new technology that will increase productivity, and more.
As they’re in charge of collecting, tracking, and organizing information across the company, IT teams often run into challenges that make it harder to ensure business growth. We’ve outlined a few of those roadblocks below.
A few common IT challenges and roadblocks
Businesses are increasingly invested in technology; In fact, 87% of senior business leaders say digitalization is a priority, but what’s holding them back? Here are a few challenges IT teams face when trying to support their organization’s digital transformation:
- Organizing tickets – Request tickets can come from marketing, sales, operations, or HR, but without one common place to store and organize information, tickets can easily get lost.
- Using IT data – When tickets/requests are scattered across many hands, data on important issues (security threats, tech issues, etc.) becomes less transparent for the entire team.
- Unified cross-department workflow – If every department has a different way of contacting IT, it’s easy for information to become siloed and unorganized.
An intuitive Work OS can help IT overcome the above challenges while also making team collaboration and communication much easier. As with all technology, IT needs to make sure their Work OS gives them the flexibility, ease of use, security, and organization they need.
We may be biased, but here’s why we think monday.com stands out:
Why use monday.com for IT?
Part of what makes monday.com unique is that anyone with any level of coding experience (from no experience to a professional developer), can use the Work OS to build a workflow and elevate how their team works. Below are a few additional elements that can help IT succeed:
- Automation and scalability – With monday.com Work OS, IT teams can use automations so that as the team grows, they can spend less time on repetitive actions (such as logging status updates) and more time on important tasks. Using automations, an IT team member can instantly build a ticketing workflow, track its progress, and then analyze where it can be improved.
- Flexibility – From Kanban, calendar, timeline, Gantt Charts, map, form, workload, and more, IT teams can use any view to examine their data. On the visual board, team members can drag and drop columns (such People Columns, Status Columns, attached links, or files) to suit their needs.
- Ease of use – Depending on the team’s size and needs, you can set up monday.com in the time it takes to make a coffee. With over 200+ templates to choose from, IT teams can pick a flow that works best for them and immediately get to work. Groups, items, and updates appear in real-time so all information is in one place and everyone can track what’s happening within the department.
- Security – With the rise of cyber attacks, an effective security system is more important than ever. Monday.com Work OS has strict security measures and protocols that help the IT department protect data and prevent any breaches. In addition, monday.com performs annual security audits to keep all security measures up to enterprise-level standards.
- Ticketing system – Tickets: the bread and butter of IT. With a Work OS, all tickets appear in one place so IT can easily track requests. On the board, team members can also view important details such as the requester’s information and issue. Once a request arrives, team leads can assign the right person to the ticket and track the status of each request.
- Integrations – Use your existing tools on monday.com. Instead of sifting through emails, team members can automatically convert emails into board items to track and manage inside the Work OS. Integrate Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk, and more in just a few clicks to consolidate your workload.
Now that we’ve shared a few ways IT can streamline their workload with monday.com, let’s dive into a customer story that sheds more light on how teams can customize a Work OS for their specific needs:
How the NHL saved on development resources with monday.com
When the National Hockey League (NHL) needed a way to remain on the cutting edge of technology, they turned to the newest innovation; the internet. They wanted a way to put their gameplay stats on the internet. This was 26 years ago, so the task required creating hundreds of custom applications for all of their business units. That meant splitting development work with an agency in Belarus and relying on email and text messages to collaborate on projects.
Their workflow created several challenges for the IT team such as:
- Organizational silos
- Distance between offices
- Incomplete specs
- Unclear prioritization and resource assignments
- Disruption in all aspects of projects
- Lack of roadmap insights
- Ad hoc communication only
- Non-functional requirements and launches not communicated
Senior Director, Carol Dann, explains that all of the above facts created inefficient workflows:
“It was tough to operate. What was in QA? What was on hold? What was coming next? What was pending? No one knew. Nobody had the overall picture of our development world, which was hard to deal with because we could never plan ahead. It was just a mess.”
To manage and define the development process, the NHL turned to monday.com Work OS.
First, Dann and her team identified the development cycle stages from research through deployment. As soon as the team onboarded, they could see who was working on what, where projects and tasks stood, which apps were on the roadmap, etc.
With monday.com’s management software, the team had full transparency into development cycles and access to necessary information in one place. Dann and her team also use monday.com to turn existing custom applications into workflow apps, preventing the need for custom development. This allowed each team member to build their own workflow app. For a massive organization such as the NHL, this saved a lot of time.
One custom application the NHL used on monday.com was for Stanley Cup—the championship trophy awarded annually to the National Hockey League playoff champion— requests. Because organizations worldwide want to borrow the cup for their event, companies need to request the cup via a form.
Using monday.com, Dann created a workflow app, integrating it with SurveyMonkey so her team could gather requests and track the data.
Before, it might have taken their IT team time, resources, and money to evaluate whether the new software met security and budget standards as well as maintain the new software’s operations. With SurveyMonkey’s monday.com integration, the IT team didn’t need to take the time to onboard a new software and Dann’s team could immediately build their ideal workflow in minutes.
For the full customer story, click here or check out our other success stories.
Of course, all IT teams have their own needs and structure preferences. We love the below template when it comes to streamlining IT processes.
Check out one of our favorite IT templates
IT can manage all incoming requests, tickets, users’ experiences, completed tasks and projects on one, colorful board. Here’s what this could look like:
Any IT team can organize their data as they like from high-level dashboards (above) to Gantt Charts, Kanban Boards (below), and colorful timelines. Give your IT team the confidence to make data-driven decisions every time, and the assurance of knowing they’re completing all requests on-time.
For more ideas on IT boards, check out the monday.com template store.
Streamline IT’s workflow with a Work OS
A well-oiled IT machine keeps your company up and running. But because they regularly interact with employees across the organization, there’s potential for records, requests, data, and more to get lost in inboxes or spreadsheets. Make it simple for your IT team to create their own workflow and manage all incoming communications and tasks on one dashboard with a Work OS.
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