How to Achieve IT Resilience to Prevent Productivity Losses
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.
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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
Today’s hybrid and remote enterprise employees need simple, reliable, and frictionless access to essential digital workplace apps and resources — from anywhere, on any device. The traditional reactive model for IT support — in which IT responds to problems only after employees report them — is undergoing a major transformation to a proactive IT model, which enables IT teams to detect and resolve issues early — well before they have a negative impact on employee productivity.
So how can organizations “shift left” toward a more proactive IT posture that strengthens IT resilience? The following four elements empower IT teams to deliver a superb digital employee experience (DEX), prevent device downtime, and ultimately mitigate productivity losses:
◦ BROAD & DEEP DATA: Drawing from DEX data that’s both broad and in-depth enables IT to generate better insights, earlier.
◦ AUTOMATED DETECTION: Sensors and automations can help IT support teams find and prioritize emerging issues before they disrupt productivity.
◦ AUTOMATED ACTIONS: Options for solving problems, including employing automated and mass healing, help streamline and accelerated response if issues are identified.
◦ OUTCOME TRACKING: Assessing how well IT actions have worked over time can help fine-tune your proactive IT strategy.
To avoid productivity-sapping problems, you need clear and complete visibility into the digital employee experience across the IT estate — and that means collecting and analyzing endpoint performance and usage data that can provide insights about devices, applications, and networks. Having a wide range of DEX data means IT can step in and solve issues relating to device and app performance, as well as other areas before a brewing IT issue affects end-user productivity or slows down business.
But sampling data once per hour or even once per 15 minutes isn’t enough. Service desk teams might miss issues that appear on only a sporadic basis or are related to specific user tasks. With the ability to enhance data with historical context, the IT team can gain a better understanding of the context surrounding issues and anomalies, finding their root causes more efficiently.
Automated root cause analysis (RCA) is critical to detecting and resolving IT issues more quickly, improving the support desk efficiency and, as a result, reducing operational costs and increasing employee productivity. With automation, IT teams can even accelerate their root cause analysis process and remove manual effort.
Root cause investigation is the process of discovering the source of technology-related issues to solve them. It’s worth emphasizing that RCA uncovers the source of IT incidents rather than simply treating the symptoms. This approach enables your support desk team to prevent the same issue from happening again. Automated RCA uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the incident investigation. This approach relies heavily on endpoint data and smart sensors for quicker incident management.
IT automation for certain lower-level tasks can solve some end-user issues more quickly, eliminating the need for an end user to open an IT ticket and lessening the burden on already-strained IT agents. In addition, automation makes the current IT talent shortage less of a challenge.
Automation is best used to address Level 1 and 2 tickets. Level 1 solutions can be as simple and straightforward as pointing the user to an existing feature, helping them proactively avoid an expired password, or walking them through a software installation. Level 2 solutions are a bit more complex, but they can still be addressed with automation. The right script can detect an issue and automatically deploy a fix across the system, often before the end user even realizes something’s wrong. For example, if an automation discovers a duplicate program taking up memory and affecting performance, it could force the redundant instance to shut down. Automations also can determine when a reboot is necessary to address performance issues and perform the restart itself, clean a C: drive’s temporary internet files, and empty the recycling bin.
In an industry where time-on-task is literally revenue, every minute of downtime caused by IT issues costs money. Some of the challenges faced by a large call center service provider, based in the United States, included:
• Slow, unreliable access to necessary applications and databases.
• Lengthy bootup/login time for agents.
• Limited visibility into end users’ systems, both physical and virtual.
• Inability to effectively monitor more than 40,000 employees dispersed around the globe.
By using DEX data to monitor the IT environment and minimize downtime, the company discovered and investigated a latency issue. Specifically, the call center service provider’s support team discovered that a rogue application was consuming more than 50% of the CPU usage. As a proactive IT measure, IT wrote a script that automatically deals with rogue applications across the IT environment. In this case, efficient root cause analysis led not only to solving an issue but also to using IT automation to prevent this type of incident from happening again
Resilience has become an increasingly pressing issue in recent years. It’s now necessary for businesses to be able to adapt to changing workplace norms, address emerging challenges such as economic uncertainty, and manage productivity.
These issues can be approached on a number of fronts, but one that’s often overlooked yet ultimately essential is the digital employee experience. Expanding visibility into your digital environment and turning that monitoring into proactive DEX management can help ensure that your organization will continue to operate smoothly, no matter what the future holds.
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