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3 June 2016

Billy MacInnesTrue confession time: for many many years I believed a myth about the IT industry. A myth that thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, believed too. What was it? That summertime really was just like it says in the song, a time when “the living is easy”. Why? Because the IT industry slowed down to a virtual crawl as customers stopped buying IT gear until September.

Turns out that although they may have stopped or drastically reduced buying equipment during the months of June, July and August in particular, they weren’t taking it easy. Not if Spiceworks is to be believed at any rate. According to data pulled from the Spiceworks community, “it’s one of the busiest times of year for IT pros”.

It found that nearly 38,000 topics and over 295,000 posts were created from June to August. As many as 5,182 topics were in EMEA. Product reviews were 8% higher than the monthly average at 5,800 (with 20% of those in EMEA) and requests for help were 10% above the average at 1,809. Spiceworks describes that as “1,809 times tech marketers have the opportunity to jump in with a solution”.

Certainly 1,809 is much much higher than zero, but while Spiceworks has an interesting perspective it’s not necessarily surprising that the summer could be a good opportunity for tech marketing types to help customers lay the groundwork for their technology projects. But that still assumes tech marketing people and IT pros aren’t away on holidays at the most popular time of the year for people to be off work.

Spiceworks said that many IT pros (especially those in education) used the summer “to switch from ‘putting out fires’ to large project mode”. The company quotes a couple of IT pros who highlighted the summer months as a time for getting major projects, renovations and upgrades completed.

However, it also found there were an average of 53 helpdesk tickets per IT pro over the summer months, equivalent to “2.4 unplanned fires to put out each work day”. This suggests that even if they want to be in ‘large project mode’, most IT pros still have to spend quite a bit of their time over the summer putting out fires.

There’s probably an element of wishful thinking here because people often believe they can use their “quiet periods” to plan but find themselves being drawn further and further into having to do more and more of the daily duties they thought would diminish.

Which brings us to something that we know to be true. Something best articulated by Robert Burns when he wrote in his poem, To a Mouse (coincidentally first published in the summer of 1786 in his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect):“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley.”

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