What Is "ITC" And Why Should It Matter To You?

What is "ITC"?

In 2022, Asana surveyed 10,000 knowledge workers to learn more about how they and their colleagues are spending their time at work. The results were sobering. On average, more than half of every employee’s day—58% of the work we do—cannot be accounted for.

We’ve all been there: wondering at the end of a long day how you got so little done, worrying about your team slowly falling behind on a project despite everyone working diligently on it, or losing confidence in your ability to remain compliant with so many untracked details.

Where does our time go? It’s lost to intake, triage, and coordination—or ITC.

• Intake. The slew of unstructured internal emails, chat messages, and one-off requests that every person and team has to manage day-to-day.
• Triage. The task of determining how to prioritize and route these inbound requests.
• Coordination. Collaborating across departments, teams, and specialties to ensure the requests that come in are effectively dealt with.
  

Here's what ITC complication looks like in real life. Say someone on the sales team needs a contract approved or a document signed by someone in the legal department. Or the legal department has to decide where to route a new client. Or a customer success manage has a feature request for the product team. Or HR needs a manager to sign off on a training document. Or the finance team has a request, and the procurement team has to figure out how to prioritize it. Or any given employee needs information that lives inside a siloed third-party platform, or better yet, inside a teammate’s head.

What makes managing ITC work so expensive?

• These are informal requests, which may be internal or external, but they all require certain amounts of cross-functional collaboration.responses, and routing more complex requests to the proper human or team.
• Most teams tend to be siloed and have their own priorities, processes, and tools, with no defined way to even communicate with one another about them.
• What’s more, most organizations have no organized way of handling ITC work; requests pile up in department-level inboxes or in employees’ personal Slack environments. And because few organizations provide employees with any kind of structure or hierarchy to help them quickly and easily prioritize requests in the context of the rest of their responsibilities, they have to figure out not only how to triage and prioritize the inbound request, but ensure it gets taken care of entirely on their own.

With process experience, no-code, and intelligent automation, there's a better way.

Why do ITC challenges persist? Simple: because most of us have written it off as an inevitable, necessary evil.

But it’s not. There's a better way to do it. It starts with monitoring your intake channels, automating repeatable responses, and routing more complex requests to the proper human or team.

That's where Tonkean, and this guide, come into play. Download it now to get started.