ITOps: It’s All About the End User
With more than 4,500 employees spread across the globe, the UK-based investment management company was challenged to support dispersed user groups that depended on highly performing technology to satisfy clients.
Here’s how Lakeside Software’s Digital Experience Cloud, powered by SysTrack, enabled the firm to expand its visibility, achieve a successful VDI rollout, adopt a proactive IT approach, and consistently deliver a quality end-user experience.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut. Ut ad minim veniam.
With World Productivity Day fast approaching on June 20, we want to recognize the importance of creating an environment that supports workplace productivity.
If you Google “Top Productivity Killers,” you’ll get a series of expected answers: cell phones, internet browsing, conversations with colleagues, etc. But what’s notably missing are the digital disruptions that impact an employee’s ability to do their job.
In May, we conducted a weekly LinkedIn poll not necessarily to challenge Google’s findings but for us to better understand employee productivity in the
How would you describe IT operations? To me, ITOps is (and always has been) all about the end user and enabling a positive digital employee experience (DEX). As digital transformation has evolved in the consumer space — from banks to retail outlets and beyond — we in IT must facilitate a similar, consumer-like experience for supporting employees in the digital workplace. ITOps must consider how end-user engagement with digital tools and technologies optimizes productivity every day — or, by contrast, how a poor digital experience can bog down productivity.
To empower this approach to ITOps, IT teams need complete visibility across the IT estate and endpoints — the core of assuring great IT service. More specifically, performance and usage data from end user devices and tools drives the visibility and the insights that empower IT teams to become much more proactive with their service desk support.
It’s common to leverage sentiment data to gain a better sense of each employee’s digital experience at work. But sentiment data can take you only so far, especially given its subjective nature. Empirical data from across the IT estate, however, can provide an objective and complete look at the health of IT assets. Hard metrics are key.
Start with baselines. Capture data on endpoint device performance and actual usage to gauge IT health and to ensure that employees have the right toolset for their roles. For instance, what if IT plans a widespread hardware refresh for 20,000 employees and rolls out standard laptops, each with a quad core, 8G of RAM, and a standard VGA connector only to discover after the fact that this uniform distribution doesn't even come close to meeting each user’s expectations — let alone their computing needs? Then you’ve just made a very expensive mistake, one that could cost millions when you consider that kind of misalignment at scale.
With data metrics, you can create a complete and accurate picture of your IT estate. A data-driven baseline helps you understand its performance health. Then you can confidently conduct a current assessment before a major network upgrade, PC refresh, or widespread software release. Having that current-state data allows ITOps to understand the success of executing the IT initiative. From a digital employee experience standpoint, you can measure the state of the IT estate after a big SAP migration, for instance. Was it successful? Are users satisfied based on their engagement with their digital work set? Or can you validate that a network upgrade has not had a negative impact on users per the baseline?
Another major value of leveraging data insights is the ability to shift from a historically reactive IT posture to a proactive one. Data makes this transformation possible, as it enables the IT team to monitor indicators (such as memory, slow startups, low battery life, or pending CPU failure as suggested by computer freezes) and manage user issues before brewing problems have an impact on their ability to work. Proactive ITOps are especially important in light of the fact that many employees won’t even open an IT ticket to address a known problem. More important, IT staff (or automations) can fix problems in many cases before they have customer-facing impact.
Think about the power of proactive IT. Imagine an employee is about to jump on a video call with a client when their computer starts to slow down. Seeing the warning signs and fixing the device proactively sets that employee up to deliver a better experience with the customer versus feeling stressed and lacking confidence in carrying out the call. Not to mention that we’ve all been on the other side of a service call, as customers, when the rep complained about their system being down. It goes without saying that complaining to the customer can have a direct impact on that company’s bottom line, as well as the consumer’s own digital experience with the company.
I can promise you that any employee wrestling with a bad digital experience is not going to deliver a good customer experience. “I’m sorry. My computer is slow this morning.” Sound familiar? Making sure that your company’s digital employee experience is strong will flow down to your consumers.
This impact is one of the reasons why the digital employee experience has become a greater priority for companies and is now catching the attention of leadership teams. It's even a board conversation because digital employee experience has a significant impact on cost savings, productivity, brand reputation, and more.
The business value is even greater given the rise of remote workforces. Back when employees worked mainly in the office, ITOps teams had a solid sense of employee sentiment, even just by hearing the watercooler conversations. Now, without a strong DEX solution that delivers across distributed workforces, IT has lost visibility. What's important to understand is that IT jobs are even harder today precisely because of that lack of visibility. Data no longer is a nice-to-have; it’s imperative for producing insights, which, in turn, allow for a strong digital workplace strategy at large.
Indeed, data enables IT teams to become more proactive while concurrently empowering end users to avoid IT problems, count on automation for certain fixes, or easily access self-help. A win-win for IT and for employees. After all, no one wants to spend 30 minutes on the phone trying to reproduce the problem, going back and forth with the IT service rep. They just don't want to go down that path. Worse, they may Google the problem to try fix it themselves, potentially creating an even bigger issue.
Keeping the focus on the end user will improve the ability of ITOps to deliver great service, in turn ensuring company-wide productivity and happy, more engaged employees.
JavaScript Placeholder
