Good for You and Me: A Better IT Experience

What have you done for me lately? For many in IT, the feeling that you’re only noticed when something breaks is ever-present. Thanklessness is hard enough to cope with. Couple that with a recent survey suggesting 84% of IT workers believe their jobs will get harder over the next three years, and two options come to mind: run screaming into another career, or prepare for burnout.

The Other View

Then there is the flip side of this story: the user who doesn’t feel like IT is easy to work with. How could that be so? Many users cringe at the thought of having to place a call to open a help desk ticket. How long will I have to wait? How many times will I have to share the same information as I get handed from one support rep to another? How long will I be willing to wait for a resolution before calling again for an update? Can’t I just get back to work?  All these frustrations – and that’s just for incident reporting.

Then there are the policy frustrations that arise because they affect productivity.  Why is it taking so long to login? This can be frustrating each morning for corporate users…I guess we can always make a cup of coffee while we wait.  Consider the level of frustration for workers who log in to multiple machines each day.  Healthcare is a great example, where nurses can log into as many as 75 machines during a shift. How many minutes are lost? Expediting the process of getting connected, personalized access means less time fiddling with IT and more time invested in patient care. Frustrating for sure, but is it fairly targeted at IT?

Better Days Ahead

A better experience for both IT and users is both urgent and important. Good experiences for both stakeholders yield higher levels of engagement, go a long way toward satisfaction and productivity, and also help retain IT staff. Additionally, IT can benefit from more unified IT that reduces the “swivel-chair” experience they face when toggling among too many consoles to complete various tasks.  Add some automation to eliminate the repetitive, reactive tasks, and IT staff can invest in more strategically valued projects.

For the users’ experience, when they are more willing to collaborate with IT, you’re able to reduce the risk of shadow IT with a side effect of reducing cybersecurity risk. They may appreciate more options to connect with IT – options ranging from self-service to chat bots and more.  Going back to that example of the long login times, this is something that is likely affecting every user in that group. One customer recently found a single-threaded login script as their root cause. The result? Login times reduced from nearly 10 minutes, down to about half a minute. IT immediately becomes a valued partner when delivering results like this!

Your Next Move

So, how do you deliver a better experience for your team and your users? This is your opportunity to make the relationship more personalized and engaging, without compromising the metrics you need to maintain (security, cost, governance, etc.). Take a read of Ivanti’s new white paper, and you’ll learn tips to help you offer the right solutions, services, and processes to make all employees more productive and satisfied with IT.