82% of Workers Avoid Reporting IT Issues, Report Finds - Channel Insider

TEXT START: More than eight in 10 workers have decided an IT problem wasn’t worth reporting, according to new research from Buchanan Technologies, raising questions about how effectively businesses and their managed service providers measure IT support performance.

The Dissection

This is a vendor-produced diagnostic that converts a structural warning into an MSP sales pitch. It correctly identifies that ticket closure measures administrative completion, not restored productive capacity. But it stops at “visibility.” Workers bypassing IT with their own tools or AI means the service desk is losing its monopoly over routine cognitive support. The article repackages that loss as demand for XLAs, proactive monitoring, and expanded provider scope.

The contradiction is the real story: 81% still trust IT support, yet 92% report behavior that corrupts the official record. Trust does not mean dependence. It means workers believe IT can handle escalation while bypassing it for ordinary work.

The Core Fallacy

The article assumes the primary problem is measurement and process design. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, better measurement changes what the provider can see and bill; it does not restore the economic necessity of the human support layer.

If workers can solve routine issues with AI or self-selected tools, the critical question is not whether the ticket record is complete. It is why the firm still needs the same volume of human ticket handlers. XLAs may improve current operations, but they cannot reverse the substitution of automated support for routine cognitive labor or alter who owns and controls the automation.

Hidden Assumptions

• Confidence that IT will eventually solve a problem is treated as proof that human IT support retains durable value.
• Employee workarounds are framed as service friction rather than evidence of substitution by AI and self-service tools.
• MSPs can observe shadow tools, AI use, unreported failures, and productivity loss despite the very bypass behavior described.
• Organizations will keep paying for experience monitoring even as automation reduces the cost of routine diagnosis and resolution.
• More accurate experience metrics will produce better economic outcomes rather than another layer of dashboards and reporting theater.
• Employees will continue routing problems through formal support channels once faster alternatives become reliable.
• Security, compliance, integration, and accountability constraints will preserve generic support roles indefinitely.
• The vendor’s survey and interpretation are representative rather than optimized to create a new service category.

Social Function

Primary classification: transition management and commercial propaganda, with a partial truth embedded inside it.

The partial truth is that SLAs can conceal unresolved user impact, and proactive monitoring can reduce real operational friction. The ideological anesthetic is the claim that this is mainly a visibility gap. The article avoids the more terminal implication: workers are beginning to route around a labor layer whose routine cognitive functions are becoming automatable.

Its commercial function is to give MSPs a survival narrative. Ticket management becomes “employee experience,” monitoring becomes “business outcomes,” and automation-driven labor erosion becomes an upsell opportunity. The carcass is being rebranded while it is still warm.

The Verdict

The article identifies an accurate symptom and supplies an evasive diagnosis. The 72% using their own tool or AI, the 92% producing incomplete support records, and the 80% seeing tickets marked resolved while the problem persists show that formal IT support is losing control of the workflow.

Under DT mechanics, XLAs are a temporary moat and a form of hospice care. They can extend the relevance of providers during the transition, but they cannot restore the mass need for human ticket labor. Routine support is being unbundled first; the remaining defensible work will cluster around security, integration, infrastructure, maintenance, and high-consequence exceptions. The owners of the automation gain leverage. Generic support handlers become overhead. Accurate symptom, evasive diagnosis, effective sales copy for a shrinking labor market.