The correct answer is 'Analyze disk I/O activity using utilities like iotop or iostat'. High I/O wait indicates that the CPU is spending significant time waiting for I/O operations to complete. Investigating disk I/O activity can help identify a potential bottleneck or excessive read/write operations that may be causing the high wait times. Upgrading the storage hardware may eventually be necessary, but initially, the administrator needs to pinpoint the problem. Adding RAM may reduce I/O by increasing the buffer cache, but it does not directly address I/O problems. Checking for network issues is unrelated to local I/O wait and does not help in this instance.