How Collective IQ® Turns Reactive IT into Truly Proactive IT
Most IT organizations still operate in “firefighting” mode: an employee opens a ticket, the service desk investigates, depending on severity and complexity multiple teams or people are involved to diagnose, and then the appropriate person or team fixes the issue. The whole process then repeats for the next reported incident. This model doesn’t scale, drains time and budget, and leaves a huge number of issues unresolved because many employees simply don’t bother to report them. And, if and when they do report them, it’s too late, the problem has already impacted their productive work.
You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure
For Dave Wagner, the turning point is changing what IT measures. “If it’s critical for employees to be productive to get their job done, you must measure and manage everything needed to do so productively in the context of that user”, he says. Then he restates the fundamental principle: “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Collective IQ® was designed around this concept. On one side, it collects traditional IT telemetry: device performance, network and connectivity data, software versions, CPU and memory usage, system errors, and crashes – all the key telemetry underlying the components supporting productive workOn the other side, it captures rich experience signals: application hangs and crashes, perceived responsiveness, quality of collaboration sessions (like Teams or Zoom), and even contextual in‑app surveys with employees.
A Complete Picture Powered by AI
As Dave puts it, Collective IQ® “takes traditional measurements about the physical devices, about the network, about connectivity, about applications, and contextually marries them with experiential metrics—including how employees feel about the experience they’re having.” Then it “uses artificial intelligence to tie that data together so that that complete picture is there, so that you can quickly and easily manage what matters.”
That complete picture is what makes proactive IT possible. By correlating infrastructure data with real experience across different locations, teams, device types, browser or OS versions, Collective IQ® detects patterns that signal trouble long before a flood of tickets hits the service desk. According to Dave, by observing these patterns over time, “we can see problems building before the employees even open a trouble ticket.”
In practice, this means IT can:
- Spot experience degradation in a critical application before it turns into a business‑impacting incident.
- Prioritize fixes based on real business impact, not just on number of tickets or generic severity levels.
- Automate recommendations and remediation actions using capabilities like AlmaAnalysis™, AlmaPredict™, and AskAlma™, which apply generative AI to guide users, suggest resolutions, and accelerate troubleshooting.
Making the Invisible Visible
Dave also points out that many issues never trigger traditional technology alerts because they don’t look like “hard failures.” Think of a sales executive on a Teams call with a key client, experiencing choppy audio due to a specific combination of version and network conditions. Without experience‑level data, that friction remains invisible; with Collective IQ®, it becomes an actionable insight and a target for improvement.
The result is a fundamental role shift: IT evolves from cost center and “ticket processing machine” to a strategic enabler, capable of predicting incidents, reducing disruptions, and designing a digital journey that fuels productivity and innovation. In an increasingly reactive world, moving toward proactive operations is exactly what separates organizations that merely “keep the lights on” from those that turn technology into a competitive advantage.
From Firefighting to Predictive Prevention
Ready to move from firefighting to predictive prevention? Explore how Collective IQ® can help your IT team anticipate issues, automate resolution, and deliver a consistently better digital experience.
Contact the Almaden team and schedule a personalized demo for your IT team.
