Part 4: Consumerize Service Management

With EasyVista, our customers are able to automate and personalize service delivery for end user employees with a mobile-first platform. In essence, Consumerizing IT is the core of what we do.

A central message of the Gartner report is Consumerization is here today, it’s not a trend to be aware of or “think” about planning for in the future. It is happening now. If IT organizations and their leaders do not embrace that fact, they will become marginalized within the company, relegated to a back office support function, providing operations and support for technology decisions made by other organizations. Once that starts to happen, it becomes much more difficult to get your seat back at the strategic table.

Gartner makes two recommendations which are central to becoming more customer oriented.

1. Encourage a culture in which the attainment of professional goals by employees is appreciated as a way in which digital technology can deliver business innovation.

At work, just like at home or in our personal lives, we are constantly bombed with requests for our time. Take something as ubiquitous as our work email. As a study conducted by Workfront in 2015 revealed on average, 90% of the communications and 14% of employee’s time was centered on email. It is by far the single most used “business” application, and one that is highly “controlled” by the IT organization. Now, compare that with how those same employees communicate in their personal lives. Email is not the primary means to communicate, sending texts (and having full conversations via text) far exceeds the use of email in our personals lives. We communicate with a few key strokes, use short hand and emoticons. Text, along with all the variants embedded within social media, is how communications happens today in the “real” world. The disconnect between IT and users is real and it is up to IT to change, not the customer.

EasyVista has been at the forefront of helping IT organizations transition from managing technology to managing services. For the past 15+ years, we have worked to provide tools to ease the day-to-day time burden of “keeping the lights on.” We believe that is still a fundamental service of IT – delivering and supporting a secure, reliable technology infrastructure – but that is not an expectation. Users “expect” it to work 24x7x365, from the CEO to shop floor.

We understand that. We are continually improving our platform and tools so this base requirement of IT consumes less time, is easier to use, and supports the new IT reality of delivery “integrated” services – regardless of who the service is (internal or external) or located (geospecific). The new world of IT operations and support is borderless, dynamic and has to expand or contract with the business and user demands.

2. Catalog valuable apps in an enterprise app store, and track user feedback on quality of experience of apps as they are, rather than focusing on required functionality.

Gartner recommends not just changing the applications to become “mobile” aware – basically putting a new skin on an old application – but changing the user experience at work. As with the email example above, there is a serious disconnect between work and life. Let’s not focus specifically on how mobile we are with our technology, let’s look at how things just work in our personal lives. Electricity – just flip a switch. Dinner – drive by and pick up a full meal. Television – hundreds of channels available for almost any type of entertainment (even on demand entertainment). And with each one of those, I choose how much or how little I “consume” – the control is in my hand. That’s the experience I have in my personal life.

Contrasted to our work lives, there is very little control we have. For many, they are assigned a location to work, issued a security badge that controls access, provided a computer (still dominated by a stationary desktop), communicated to through email, working with applications you would never see outside of work, and in many cases, when you need something (even as insignificant as mailing something), there isn’t an easy way to find out how to do it. And when they need something from IT, the response doesn’t measure up to the service delivery from IT they use in their personal lives. This is a common experience employees (from top to bottom) have that leads to frustration and to bypassing IT to get what they want quicker. Change to improve user experience is long overdue and is being planned or carried out it most IT organizations today.

EasyVista has seen this first hand, and we have also seen the rise of “function specific” applications – many of them delivering their applications “as a Service” – explode onto the scene. Their promise is to provide applications which more closely mirror our personal lives – providing access to the company’s HR or Travel “systems” that looks and feels the same as most of the applications they interact with in their personal lives.

Optimize the user experience – just “make it work”

Although point solutions are great and help move companies in the right direction, it’s providing patches rather than a full solution. Our visions, new tools and applications provide the foundation to change the entire user experience. Instead of taking one aspect of their employees lives, why not provide a way to just “make it work” across the board. Our Service AppStore is not just a way to download an approved application from a webpage, it is a path to changing how users (now customers) interact with technology at work.

EasyVista believes the way forward is providing a user experience at work which mirrors their personal lives, without compromising IT’s ability to control security and risk or deliver quality services. To do that, requires both a change in mindset and the overall operating environment. If done properly, the IT organization, leaders and CIO remain a vital part of the ongoing strategic decision making process for the company. Consumerization is a fact. Most IT leaders understand they must move to this level of service or suffer inefficiencies and remain tactical versus operating as a more strategic role in the organization. EasyVista supports both operations and delivery of IT services, plus provides a path to consumerize the full lifecycle of workplace technology. We encourage you to talk with us and find out how we can help Consumerize Service Management.

If you missed any article within this series, they are available on the blog or by clicking the links below. At EasyVista, we support the CIO and IT organization as it moves from just providing technology, to providing integrated services across the whole enterprise, along with a user experience which mirrors our personal lives.

Consumerize Your Enterprise Software Before It Consumes You – Part 1, Gartner Report

Consumerize Your Enterprise Software Before It Consumes You – Part 2, Gartner Report

Consumerize Your Enterprise Software Before It Consumes You – Part 3, Gartner Report

EasyVista has the full Gartner report available for download, click here to get it today!

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