The News
Buchanan Technologies has released its 2026 IT Experience Gap Report, based on a survey of 850 employed U.S. non-IT office workers conducted in July 2026. The headline finding is stark: 82% of workers have decided an IT problem wasn’t worth reporting, and 72% have used their own tool or AI to solve an IT issue rather than contacting the service desk. The report also found that 80% of workers have had a ticket marked resolved while the underlying problem persisted, with nearly a quarter of those employees still relying on a workaround or having given up entirely.
Analyst Take
The Metric That’s Missing From Every IT Dashboard
The conventional service desk scorecard tracks response time, resolution time, and first-call resolution rate. What it cannot track is the problem that never became a ticket. Buchanan’s data makes that blind spot quantifiable: if 82% of workers are routinely self-triaging and deciding the official channel isn’t worth the friction, then IT operations leaders are making resource and staffing decisions against a dataset that is structurally incomplete. A team hitting 97% SLA compliance may still be presiding over a quietly dysfunctional experience, because the remaining friction has simply routed itself off the books.
This is the core argument of the report, and it’s a sound one. The finding that 81% of workers express confidence in their IT team, while simultaneously bypassing it at scale, is the clearest evidence that the gap is procedural rather than competence-based. Workers aren’t abandoning the service desk because they distrust the engineers. They’re abandoning it because the process of engaging the service desk carries a cost, in time and cognitive overhead, that often exceeds the perceived value of the fix.
What the Shadow IT Shift Actually Signals
The 72% figure on employees using personal tools or AI to resolve IT issues deserves more attention than it will likely get in a board-level summary. This isn’t a workforce trend confined to consumer-grade workarounds. It reflects the same structural pressure that government and enterprise development teams are experiencing with developer tooling. According to ECI Research’s Google GovTech Survey, 56.0% of respondents selected “Frequently (Approved vendor lists lack modern developer platforms)” when asked how often procurement or contractual requirements force engineering teams to use suboptimal developer tools. The parallel is direct: when official channels fail to provide tools that match the pace of the work, people find alternatives. In the consumer IT support context, that alternative is ChatGPT or a quick browser search. In enterprise development, it’s an unapproved SaaS tool or a workaround library. The workaround is a symptom of the same disease.
For ITDMs, this matters because shadow resolution creates invisible technical and operational debt. The ticket is never filed, the pattern is never identified, and the root cause is never addressed. A single employee solving their own Outlook sync issue with a third-party tool is benign. At scale, across a 10,000-person organization, that behavior represents untracked exposure and an erosion of the support model’s legitimacy.
The Resolution Integrity Problem
The closed-but-not-fixed finding is arguably the most operationally damaging data point in the report. When 80% of workers have experienced a ticket closure that didn’t match reality, and 24% of those workers are still relying on a workaround, the service desk’s most fundamental output, a resolved problem, is being systematically misrepresented in the record. This isn’t a performance failure in the traditional sense. SLAs are being met. Tickets are being closed. The metrics look fine. The experience does not.
ECI Research’s Google GovTech Survey found that 56.8% of respondents selected “Moderate impact (Complaints are common, but retention remains steady)” when asked how developer frustration or burnout is impacting engineering retention. That finding, from a technically specialized workforce, maps onto a broader dynamic: sustained friction that doesn’t cross a threshold into attrition still carries a cost. Productivity degrades quietly. Workarounds proliferate. Institutional knowledge about what the official system can and cannot do shapes how employees engage with it, and that shaping is almost never captured in the metrics leadership reviews.
Buchanan’s recommendation to pair SLAs with experience level agreements (XLAs) is the right structural response. XLAs shift the measurement question from “was the ticket closed?” to “did the employee’s problem actually go away?” That’s a harder question to answer, and a more honest one. Organizations willing to instrument experience quality alongside operational throughput will have a more accurate picture of where their support model is working and where it’s leaking productivity.
Looking Ahead
The managed services market is heading toward a clearer bifurcation between providers who treat SLA compliance as the ceiling of accountability and those who treat it as the floor. Buchanan’s positioning around XLAs is a bet that enterprise buyers will increasingly demand the latter, and the data suggests that bet is well-timed. As AI-assisted self-resolution becomes more capable and more accessible, the volume of officially unreported issues will grow. That dynamic makes experience measurement more important, not less, because the service desk’s visible workload will continue to shrink while the invisible friction persists.
For IT leaders evaluating managed services contracts over the next 12 to 24 months, the practical implication is this: any provider that cannot instrument and report on experience quality alongside operational metrics is offering an incomplete view of how their support is performing. The organizations that move first to establish XLA baselines will also be the ones with the clearest data to justify or redirect support investment. Buchanan is positioning to own that conversation, and the firms that don’t follow will find their dashboards telling a story that their employees no longer recognize.
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