Insights

Escaping the Cycle of Reactive IT

At this year’s Confidential Computing Summit, McKinsey’s keynote hit a nerve with enterprise leaders: the IT Doom Loop.

It’s a pattern many have lived through—tight budgets, misaligned priorities, slow delivery, and even slower business confidence. One slide captured it perfectly: IT spends most of its time “keeping the lights on,” while business units invest around it, leading to fragmented tools, duplicated effort, and rising long-term costs.

The root cause? A breakdown between business and tech—not in intent, but in visibility, shared accountability, and system design.

At Bloomfilter, we see this loop up close. It shows up in inconsistent delivery, shifting priorities, opaque investments, and misaligned expectations. And while no tool can fix the loop alone, systems like Bloomfilter are helping teams expose the underlying problems, quantify them, and build new operational habits that lead out of the loop—for good.

What causes the loop?

McKinsey’s presentation pointed to several core drivers:

• Business leaders aren’t steeped in IT economics, and tech leaders struggle to explain them.
• Strategic planning is disconnected from actual execution data.
• Short-term fixes pile up and eventually look like tech debt.
• New tooling adds complexity without improving clarity or throughput.

This results in a compounding cycle: fewer successful outcomes → lower confidence → fewer investments → more short-term firefighting.

Breaking the loop starts with system visibility

You can’t escape the loop without changing how you measure and manage delivery. Our customers start by asking:

• Where is work slowing down?
• Which initiatives are truly aligned with strategy?
• What’s the cost per outcome—not per hour?
• What’s happening that we’re not seeing in Jira?

Bloomfilter’s platform helps leaders answer these questions through five critical modules:

Process Map

See how work actually flows—not how you think it flows. Catch skipped steps, reversals, and bottlenecks across teams and vendors before they show up in postmortems.

Process Analysis

Benchmark delivery performance across workflows. Compare throughput, reaction time, and consistency, then standardize what works.

Adherence

Score every task and initiative for process risk. Flag when teams bypass testing, skip reviews, or diverge from best practices—and quantify the cost of inconsistency.

Strategy

Connect epics and workstreams to actual business outcomes. Know which initiatives are on track, which are at risk, and how much of your roadmap is being delivered—on time and in scope.

Financials

Link cost, output, and value. Understand the spend behind each initiative and whether delivery performance supports investment.

What our customers are learning

In practice, this visibility has changed how teams operate. One customer used the Strategy module to detect that less than half their roadmap was tied to active initiatives—leading to reprioritization and clearer stakeholder alignment.

Another found, through Adherence scoring, that key features were skipping testing more than 30% of the time. That insight led to tighter quality gates and fewer production incidents.

And across the board, delivery and finance leaders are using Financials to move conversations from “what did this cost?” to “what did we get for it?”

Break the loop, don’t just monitor it

The IT Doom Loop isn’t just a product of bad tools or slow teams—it’s the outcome of siloed systems, disconnected feedback loops, and decision-making without data. Breaking it means moving from disconnected functions to integrated systems thinking.

That starts by making the loop visible—and making it accountable.

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