Your job as an IT professional has never been more valuable, so why does it feel like you’re always struggling to be more productive? Project management, meetings, and other administrative tasks take up a good chunk of your day. The constant need to manage technical debt and backlogs, all with tight budgets and limited staff, compound the challenge.

It all makes engaging in more value-added tasks harder, but 2024 is a new year, with new opportunities to improve productivity. Indeed, with the right processes and technologies, you can stage a productivity revolution, one that will help your organization’s needs as well as your own.

Here are four things you can do to make 2024 your most successful and productive year ever.

Stop shadow IT from rising by optimizing your processes

Shadow IT has been an IT productivity killer for years, but let’s say you’ve been fortunate enough to have tamed that particular beast, whether through constant communication and direct feedback with business units or some other means. How do you keep the monster from rising again? 

First, eliminate the conditions that lead to shadow IT by ensuring your backlog remains tight and focused. Focus on gaining complete visibility into your processes so you can discover the cause of inefficiencies that might cause a backlog. Then, implement solutions to fix any bottlenecks that could contribute to those inefficiencies.

Next, use automation to improve process consistency and predictability. Automation allows you to design a consistent process and be confident that it will run very close to optimal. Achieve even better optimization by bringing human beings into the loop to make final decisions and ensure your processes are adhering to business rules.

Dig deep into your processes with process mining

Process mining can provide you with the visibility you need to identify areas of improvement. Process mining analyzes event logs from business systems to provide a visual representation of workflows. You can see bottlenecks and where workflows deviate from the ideal process flow and use that information to improve your processes.

Process mining gives you the data you need to have meaningful conversations with other line of business leaders about process improvements. For example, let’s say your company is going through a hiring spree yet the process has been bogged down by employees not receiving their laptops or certain IT permissions. Why is this happening? What’s causing the backup? How many resources are we using to try and fix the problem? With process mining, you’ll be able to see where the issues are and work with HR to proactively and efficiently address them using quantifiable and qualifiable data. You’ll save yourself some headaches for both your team and the HR team.

Use AI to augment your opportunities

While there’s been a lot of chatter about whether generative AI solutions pose a threat to IT professionals’ careers, the reality is that AI is far more of an IT helper than a foe. Think of AI as another worker–a sidekick there to help you and your team bring new solutions online, quickly.

Machine learning algorithms can do everything from accelerate or even remove manual and tedious tasks to augment decision-making by offering recommendations on how to improve workflow processes. AI can free up your time to work on more meaningful and value-added projects simply by helping work move faster through your organization and taking work off of your plate. In addition, Generative AI can help unlock the wealth of information and answers often locked in documents and troves of databases across the organization through meaningful integration with your information sources. These AI knowledge assistants are proving to be an efficiency advantage to knowledge workers when seeking answers, summaries or even generative capabilities during the course of their work.

Create a more cohesive customer view with a data fabric architecture

If yours is like many organizations, you probably have multiple systems representing each customer–CRM, accounts payable, customer experience, and so on. Creating a holistic view of that customer requires a data architecture strategy that provides a cohesive and unified view of enterprise data and integrates those three systems. Data fabric allows you to place an abstraction layer across those systems, effectively bringing these solutions together.

Not only will this provide your organization with a complete view of each customer, it will help you become more productive. Data fabric reduces the need to integrate disparate systems and provides a foundation for the accelerated development of applications tailored to customers’ unique needs. You’ll be able to minimize the amount of busy work while doing what you love–creating solutions that provide your business with a competitive advantage.

That entails making your organization more productive and efficient, but too often your own productivity and efficiency have likely suffered as a result. Put a stop to that in 2024. Use these four strategies to make this the year of your personal IT productivity revolution.

Medhat Galal is Senior Vice President of Engineering, Appian.