Just In Time

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User productivity is paramount to all of our businesses. While the platforms change, the OS’s are upgraded, applications morph, the constant is that we need to provide the user with the tools they need to be productive and efficient.

A while back, I was invited to visit with an IT department.  During the conversations it came out that they were in a very reactive mode and they also had a large set of projects that were in progress.  All of the projects discussed were given a Priority 1 status.  On top of all that, the C-level attendees discussed how to innovate the IT department.  Sound familiar?  In today’s economic state, IT departments are having to find ways to do more with less while BYOD, consumerization, and other trends can increase some of the challenges for IT.

While having the discussion I kept thinking about some of the experiences I had while working in support.  Everyone’s issue was the highest priority (at least to them).  Time is a precious resource and always in limited supply.  At times support is in a very reactive mode and firefighting is the name of the game. But we all know that this is not a sustainable model and that it ultimately leads to customer dissatisfaction.

During this time I was introduced to a model that described how to transition from reactive to proactive, then from proactive to trusted advisor.  The model discusses Just in time (JIT).  JIT is a concept that means we need information or changes much quicker to be efficient.   JIT knowledge management would indicate that knowledge-based articles are created within a few hours of the issue not a month later or 6 weeks later.  The whole point of JIT is productivity and efficiency.

With all of the changes and challenges, what constants are there for the IT department?  The one constant is the user.  User productivity is paramount to all of our businesses.  While the platforms change, the OS’s are upgraded, applications morph, the constant is that we need to provide the user with the tools they need to be productive and efficient.  User Oriented IT helps us keep an eye on the ball.  User productivity is paramount if IT is to become a business enabler and innovator.

As we work on the new features in the next LDMS release, we’ve put even more these thoughts and principles into our product.

Stay tuned. You’re going to love the results.

The Parable of the Bricklayer

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What kind of bricklayer are you? Are bricklayer building an impenetrable wall or are you helping build the business through user oriented IT?

What kind of bricklayer are you? Are bricklayer building an impenetrable wall or are you helping build the business through user oriented IT?

The user oriented approach to IT can be a difficult one to consider when your current world is focused on firefighting call queues and dealing with irate employees who are experiencing technology failures while being asked to cut costs at every turn.

It sounds like your Incident management is broken and you need a new tool to fix it right? Well that’s possible, but have you considered taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture from a user’s point of view.

Consider the parable of the bricklayer:

A man was walking to work when he passed a building site where there were a number of construction site workers. He was curious about what was planned for the site as it was in his neighborhood.  He asked the first worker what he was doing.

The first worker said, “I’m a brick layer so I’m taking bricks piling one on top of another and putting cement between them to hold them together. “ The worker went back to his task grumbling that he must get this finished before lunch and move on to the next task on his list.

Meanwhile the curious man still wasn’t sure what was going on so he asked a second bricklayer the same question and he answered “I’m putting up a wall. We are on a huge construction project and my job today is to build the outside wall before I go home.”

The man walked on and asked a third worker what he was doing. The third worker responded with pride in his voice, “We are just beginning to build a brand new wing for this school which is nurturing and educating the next generation to be the greatest thinkers and leaders for our nation. So I am helping build a great environment that will benefit all our futures.”

From the three site workers the man got three different perspectives, each saw his task in a different scenario.  One was focused on the immediate task in hand, the second saw he was contributing to something bigger although still only concerned about the immediate job in hand while the third was doing exactly the same job but he saw the bigger picture vision and future benefit beyond the daily need.

Your call queues might be high because there is a reoccurring incident that is really annoying your users, which really just needs problem management to get to the root cause in order to reduce your calls. You may actually be constantly firefighting because the rest of the business thinks your only concern is fixing technical failures not providing IT solutions to generate new revenues. As a result, they impose their IT solutions upon you to execute rather than consulting you.

You might have irate employees who don’t see why they should be phoning to tell you that the email server is down because they think you should know this already. They think rather than incident management what you really need is integration with Event management to help you know about these kind of outages so that your users don’t feel they have to tell you about them. Your costs may be high because you have a great Incident management system but when it comes to request management you have no integration to automatically deploy software requests so your man hour labor costs are disproportionately high through incessant manual upgrades.

Thinking beyond simple incident management or even service management to how your users see things will take you on your first steps to User Oriented IT as well as a way of inspiring your team to greater things. So the question is this: What kind of bricklayer are you? Are bricklayer building an impenetrable wall or are you helping build the business through user oriented IT?

Patch Tuesday

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Join us on Wednesday, May 15 as we discuss the patches that Microsoft will release tomorrow as part of the May Patch Tuesday.

Last week Microsoft announced 10 bulletins for May Patch Tuesday.  Among these should be a fix for Security Advisory 2847140 which is a major cyber security threat targeting IE 8.   Microsoft released a Fix IT for this vulnerability last week in an effort to help reduce risk of exposure to this threat.  The vulnerability could be used in what is referred to as a watering hole attack, in which an attacker would exploit a third-party site that a particular group would tend to frequent.  The hope being that any one of the intended group would visit the exploited site and if using IE 8 could be exploited in turn.   There is probably evidence that this vulnerability could already have been exploited in the wild as far back as March of this year.

Join us on Wednesday, May 15 as we discuss the patches that Microsoft will release tomorrow as part of the May Patch Tuesday.  We will also discuss third-party releases for Patch Tuesday as well as recap all bulletins released for the Shavlik Protect products since the April Patch Tuesday.  Sign up for this and other Shavlik product webinars here.

Please, Help Yourself?

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Service desks are on a mission to encourage their end users to help themselves. Instead of contacting the service desk, they are driving the usage of self-service with a view to freeing up some much needed resources and relieving the burden of every service desk’s bugbear—the dreaded password reset and account unlock. There have been many successful (and less successful) adoptions of self-service, with some service desks realizing benefits, whereas others have actually found that their call volumes have increased as end-users take to the telephones to vent their frustration at not being able to find the answer they were looking for.

The benefits and pitfalls of self-service are far too numerous to squeeze into this bite-sized blog, but luckily the Service Desk Institute (SDI) and LANDesk recently embarked on a research project to discover if end users were actually happy to help themselves. Do they feel empowered by solving their own IT issues? Are they rejoicing in the time savings that self-service technology can offer? Or are they reluctant or antagonistic, believing that the service desk is paid to do a job, and that job is to fix IT when it breaks? For the first time end users were asked their opinions, and the results were very revealing.

Without wanting to give too much away, the report found that 43 percent of end users prefer to use self-service in preference to contacting the service desk. This is an important result, and bodes well for service desks exploring the self-service route. Additionally, we found that for those who do not currently have access to self-service, 71 percent would be interested in using this facility in the future. It is clear then that the appetite from end users is there.

So, can we expect self-service to really take-off in the future? Very much so, but with one important caveat – self-service is not for everyone. There will be some sectors or organizations where self-service will never be a viable option (investment banks immediately spring to mind – when IT failures can cost millions in lost revenue, it would be foolish to expect end users to seek out a solution by themselves or log a call). The trick is to understand your user population , what they would like to see in a self-service tool, and what would make them use it. Our self-service report has shed some light on to the thoughts and feelings of the end-user population, and has hopefully prompted readers to think about the type of questions they might ask. It’s important to get this consultative process right – the future of your self-service adventure depends on it.

A full copy of Self Service – Is it serving its purpose? Can be found here: http://info.landesk.com/Q2EMEANorthLANDeskSDISelfServiceReportApril13_LP.html

Daniel Wood is the Head of Research & Publications, Service Desk Institute

Big Shifts in ITSM Land

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Last week, the UK Government sold its controlling stake in ITIL to Capita.

Why is that significant?

ITIL is the library of documents that IT organizations around the world refer to for the framework of recommended processes and activities to help an IT department operate in a “customer” and “service” centric fashion. It’s the set of books that you refer to in order to do IT Service Management. It is not definitive, it is not perfect, and no organization ever implements everything that is described. But we take what we need from it to make IT better.

It’s a big body of work, and it supports a massive global community of consultants, analysts, trainers, documenters, auditors, and vendors. Everyone likes to criticize it, but it’s the only good established and proven set of guidelines that we’ve got.

Strangely—and I’m speaking as a Brit—ITIL was authored originally from UK Government initiatives, and has to this point been perceived as ‘owned’ by the UK Government. It started in Public Sector and is bourne from process, procedure, and methodical working.  It’s a big slow dog with a whole ecosystem on its back. But it is referenced and followed worldwide. In Feburary 2013 alone, over 20,000 individuals set ITIL foundation exams worldwide.

Now Capita is a private company. They provide BPM and Support Service solutions to large corporations. They employ 52,000 people in the UK, Europe, South Africa and India. They are the type of organization that helps combine multiple local government operations into one, offer managed service solutions including outsourcing, and build big-scale integrated professional services solutions for massive business. They bid for government tenders to make big changes. At times I’m sure their name has been connected one with embarrassing IT/government project failure or another. I’m not certain, I’ve not checked but they are the type of business you’d hear mentioned in the computer press on that sort of story.

So why was it sold? To save government money and allow them to focus some resources elsewhere. Times are tough. It is undoubtedly a viable earner, and cost Capita £10M upfront with a further £9.4M for each of the next three years.

Does this matter. Will the sale affect you? Should you care?

Yes, you should.

ITIL processes to a small or large extent are increasingly online. Datacenters, cloud services, smartphone app, utilities billing system, broadband, media, and manufacturing enterprise and countless government services are online. They affect our lives all day every day. The organizations that provide your IT life increasingly use ITIL concepts. ITIL helps them improve their business and their products and services. Take ITIL away and of course the world keeps turning, but invest and enhance ITIL and everything benefits.

Who wins? I can’t be sure, but this is how I hope it pans out:

  • Capita. It’s their game to win now. If they execute with direction and focus like a private enterprise business should, they have the potential to push and grow the uptake of ITIL significantly. Success is greater growth, improvement, uptake. Like anything that comes out of public sector into the private one, there is often money to be made.
  • The ecosystem. Again, as long as Capita invest and promote ITIL more than has been done previously, it’s all good for those that do business based on the ongoing interest and uptake of ITIL.
  • The IT department and the ITIL practitioner. Suddenly ITIL becomes a more efficiently promoted and enhanced money-making engine, and all the money ultimately comes from their individual IT budgets.
  • The End User. They should benefit because hopefully more organizations will improve their IT service delivery so ultimately they become more productive.
  • The consumer and Joe Public. Let ITIL wither away and yes of course the world keeps turning, but invest and enhance ITIL and everything and everyone benefits.

Wow. That sounds really that good. But let’s take another more pessimistic look.

  • Capita get sit wrong. They turn an almost-open set of standards into locked down, expensive and hard to access. The UK government didn’t really do much, it relied on other bodies—and many of the businesses in the ecosystem—to push the success of ITIL. Capita see reduced incomes and end of life the whole project.
  • The ecosystem has enough. It gets hard to make profit and they look for new dogs. New frameworks and best practices arise all the time. A big shift could turn the whole ITSM industry into turmoil.
  • The IT Department. They just spent the last three years implementing ITIL Incident and Problem and Change Management processes. Now ITIL does ‘dark’ and everyone is talking about the next big thing. Clearly that silver bullet didn’t work.
  • The EndUser. “Huh? IT? you mean those guys on ‘the help desk’ and the ‘geeks’? We don’t use them anymore”.
  • At home. The world keeps turning. But just maybe it’s not quite as reliable and efficient and well managed and ultimately innovative as it could have been in the example above.

There are some reassuring signs, however that things are going in a positive direction. Capita has also purchased PRINCE2 from the UK Government. That’s another set of widely used guidelines and principles around Project Management. And they acquired the rather cool, innovative boutique ITIL simulation training specialists at G2G3. These guys know their stuff and think commercial, but for ITIL success.

The sale of ITIL may seem unimportant and very far away. I’m sure it’s not made the news in Dallas or Singapore. It’s not made much news in the UK. But just maybe we should keep our eyes on this story. It could affect everyone’s future.

Capita. The eyes of the ITSM world are on you. What are you going to do now?

Download the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Client Management Tools

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The 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Client Management Tools is now available. Once again LANDesk finds itself as a leader among endpoint protection vendors. If you’d like to read the report, click here and learn why LANDesk was named as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Client Management Tools.

Read the report.

A Real Mobile Service Story

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Load Tray message on a copier

Five years ago I would have had to walked back to my desk, picked up my phone, dialed the number for the IT help desk. Then I’d have had to describe the issue, and hopefully the support guy on the end of the phone would have known exactly which printer I was talking about. Time to complete this task? About 5 minutes.

I had one of those clarity moments the other day. It’s a familiar story to anyone who works in and office environment with computers and printers. I was sitting at my desk looking at a big document that I’d been sent to review. I decided to review the document on a flight I was taking later in the day. (I like to review big documents on paper while I’m travelling), so I clicked Print and my computer told me the document was on the way to the printer.

I was then straight on my way to a meeting and I wanted to grab that printout as I went, so up I jumped and I walked the 50 feet to the shared printer that is used by those in the Product Management section of the LANDesk offices. I got there and discovered there was no printout waiting for me.

Being mildly IT literate, I didn’t panic, I looked at the printer and saw–not the dreaded ‘paper jam’ which always strikes terror (and a surreal mental picture) to anyone looking at a printer–but the east-to-fix “Out of Paper” message. Yes, even I can fix that.

The usual cupboard full of spare paper ready to be loaded was empty. No spare paper. I checked the floor, the shelves, and nearby desks. There was no paper to be found. My little print job was politely queued up waiting to be printed, at the front of the line, but the printer was standing there with arms folded, frowning and refusing to do anything until it got some paper.

Five years ago I would have had to walked back to my desk, picked up my phone, dialed the number for the IT help desk, then waited and waited, until someone answered. Then I’d have had to describe the issue, and hopefully the support guy on the end of the phone would have known exactly which printer I meant. Time to complete this task? About 5 minutes.

These days we live in a self-service world. We live in a consumerization, BYOD, social world where we expect to be productive all the time. If we can’t we expect to make ourselves productive first and call for help second. So that’s never going to happen any more because it doesn’t fit against my world.

Mind you, two weeks ago I would have walked back to my desk, opened my browser, clicked on the shortcut to take me to the Service Desk self service page, clicked on a shortcut to report a printer fault and filled in the details and clicked ok. That would take me about two minutes to complete that task.

But you know what would really actually have happened in both cases? In the real, selfish, busy, messy, human land? I’d have seen that the printer wasn’t printing, that it was out of paper, and I’d have just gone straight on to my next meeting. Isn’t that mean? It wasn’t urgent, I was in a rush for something else and I knew that eventually when the paper was put in, my printout would come out and wait for me.

So the people suffering are not me. It’s the other people needing to print more urgently, and the IT department that doesn’t know about the fault stopping people being productive. Think about how many other people with urgent print needs would have been impacted and made less productive because of my natural human behavior. I feel bad about that.

Anyway, I noticed a poster from our IT department stuck up on the wall next to the printer. Options on the poster included “Let us know that the printer needs more paper”, “Report a paper jam that you can’t fix”, “Report another printer error that you can’t fix”, and Show alternative printers near me.” Next to each option was a QR code. So I took out my phone, scanned the need more paper code, instantly got an OK message on my phone, and headed off to my meeting. Total time? Thirty seconds if you include reading and taking phone out of pocket. And I did that because it was easy and it didn’t need me to go back to my desk or to talk to anyone, or even to type anything. I pressed a virtual button.

And you know of course that an incident process was automatically created in our Service Desk went straight to the mobile device of the local IT/facilities guy who read the detail of the incident (location, printer, description of the incident – all stuff I didn’t have to type in). And by the time I came back round past the printer, there was a stack of new paper, the printer was fully loaded and my printout was waiting for me.

Now, I could talk about how LANDesk technology can automatically detect statuses and alerts from devices like printers and bring them into your Service Desk as event processes, which is all good IT service focused stuff and obviously is an important part of mature IT service management. But if you operate an IT model where you encourage self-sufficiency, then you would be encouraging employees to just insert more paper in when the printer runs out. That’s empowering and simple and reduces IT workload. Unless you run out of spare paper. But as the story shows, a physical real-world issue (lack of spare paper) caused an IT Incident (I Can’t Print), And I’m a customer of IT, an End-User, and that printer is an IT thing. And, actually, I don’t care whose ‘thing’ it is. I pressed print and expect printout.

The story I’m telling is the one about how we can now make it super super easy for an employee or any other person to interact with physical objects to communicate about those physical objects, mobile from anywhere. And not only mobile, but in the context of a physical device. People interact with Things the outcome is Process, and the outcome of Process is that other people interact with those Things, and People become Productive.

It’s very exciting. and you know the best bit? When that IT (or facilities) guy scooted past with a stack of spare paper, and loaded the printer, he took out his phone and scanned another code on the printer, and walked off. That was it. He’d scanned and it resolved the Incident. SLA was achieved, and business continued to be productive. All mobile, all process, all real. And I got my printed document which I ended up not reading on my flight because I wrote this blog article instead. :-)

Terminal Emulation: Productivity Never Goes Out of Style

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Terminal Emulation remains a prime example of software evolution as the hardware on which it operates has morphed so dramatically.

Most people fondly remember their first Windows PC. If yours was like mine, it had a floppy disk drive for expandable memory.  We laugh at the portable phone Michael Douglas used in the movie “Wall Street.”  Remember the original Nintendo gaming console? A big evolution to the Wii series currently connected to your television.

There is a common theme here among these items: The hardware has evolved, but the use cases and core functionalities have remained the same.  When technology works and is widely adopted, its demise is predicted for many years but what usually happens is that users prefer to see it evolve rather than disappear.

Windows has come a long way since my first exposure to Windows 3.1.  My iPhone, a far more advanced (and thankfully, pocket-able) cell phone than those from the 1980’s; and my Wii is most commonly used to play the games from the old systems that kept me busy for way too many hours as a kid.  The hardware has changed, but the change in my user experience has been gradual, and still very familiar at its core.

The same is true for task workers using enterprise applications.  Mobile computers, including the devices used in warehouses, on retail floors and throughout the supply chain, have changed significantly over the past two decades.  Today, the term “mobile computer” includes consumer devices like tablets and smartphones in certain use cases.  However, as the hardware has changed, core software applications have progressively evolved to keep the user experience familiar and comfortable – ensuring optimal productivity.

Terminal Emulation remains a prime example of software evolution as the hardware on which it operates has morphed so dramatically.  What is it that keeps Terminal Emulation around and growing?  It is still the most efficient and cost effective method for high volume, enterprise-grade data input. Despite the “green screen” user interface, there are 5 reasons TE remains so widely used:

  1. Terminal Emulation works.  Over two decades of market use prove its stability.
  2. It’s widely adopted.  Internal estimates suggest roughly 68% of rugged mobile computers run Wavelink TE.
  3. It has evolved. Terminal Emulation ran on DOS, Palm OS, Windows PocketPC. Today it runs on today’s Windows Mobile and Android operating systems. It has also evolved with leading back-end software.
  4. Terminal Emulation enables productivity. Task workers are familiar and can easily work with it.
  5. Terminal Emulation remains innovative.  Wavelink continues to invest in new features that increase its accessibility, including Speakeasy, which voice-enables existing Terminal Emulation applications.

Terminal Emulation remains the platform of choice for many enterprise applications in part because it has been with us for so long that it is the standard-bearer against which any potential alternative would have to measure – in terms of cost and productivity.  Wavelink TE is used by 25 of the top 30 retailers in North America and by eight of the top 10 retailers in the world, according to internal statistics.

Like our other tech examples, the display may change, but the reliability and dependability never goes out of style.  Who thought they’d still play Super Mario Brothers on a flat screen television, using a wireless, motion-detecting controller?

The Billy Haters

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Billy expects the world and leaves nothing for IT except contempt. His voice volume averages 105 decibels when he’s “talking” on the phone with IT, and he probably doesn’t have a mother who taught him any manners.

Yesterday I was reading through the “Tales from Tech Support” subreddit and was floored by the things I was reading about. From the most unpleasant help desk calls to the frustratingly low amount of resources that IT was given, I walked away from that learning experience with a brand new perspective on the challenges that IT faces day in and day out. One challenge seemed to rise to the top over and over again and has proven to be true in a multitude of customer visits that we’ve made: It was the challenge of dealing with Billy.

Billy has many different faces depending on where you work, but the personality behind the face is always the same. He’s pompous and arrogant, knows little and cares even less about what IT does, and every time his name is mentioned your teeth clench together and your eyes dilate slightly. He expects the world and leaves nothing for IT except contempt. His voice volume averages 105 decibels when he’s “talking” on the phone with IT, and he probably doesn’t have a mother who taught him any manners. (This article is meant in no way to reflect poorly on the name Billy or any derivative, it was just the first name that was rattled off when I asked my coworkers for a random name).

In interviewing customers and reading through forums, Billy seemed to come up again and again. Some organizations had many Billys while others only had one or two. Yet Billy seemed to be taking up 90-95% of all discussion topics a lion’s share of IT’s time and energy. What jumped out to me was how stark the difference was between how IT organizations approached dealing with Billy. I learned that there were two types of organizations, (1) those who allowed Billy to affect how they did their job, and (2) those who saw Billy as an opportunity to be more effective in their job.

The Billy Haters
Many IT organizations were consumed by Billy; they threw darts at his picture in the IT break room and made memes that were circulated internally defacing Billy’s already stained reputation. Billy ruled their every thought and added unnecessary stress to their life outside of work. They would think about how depressing and emotionally taxing their job was because of Billy. In other words, Billy had accomplished exactly what he wanted to accomplish. He was the center of IT’s attention.

What is interesting about Billy Haters is that they tended to separate themselves from end users in general. They approached IT with the “us v. them” mentality. Billy Haters tended to demand more control over all users, and saw themselves as the policemen over the company. Users working with Billy Haters were treated with more disdain by IT, and they were usually less likely to ask for help from them. Users were also less likely to follow IT policies and IT was less aware of user activity. Billy Haters were being circumvented by the good users, and being inundated by the Billys.

The Billy Opportunists
The second group of IT organizations saw Billy as an opportunity. These organizations thought of Billy as a customer who was keeping IT in business. While still bothered by Billy, they treated him with respect and never reacted to his rants. Billy never got under their skin, and he rarely entered the minds of IT outside of his requests for help. Sometimes Billy would pass by in the hall and IT would smile and say hello. Billy was an opportunity to stretch the limits of IT.

The Billy Opportunists had a very strategic role inside of the organization. They were very often contributing to top line revenue growth by improving company production. Billy Opportunists worked  collaboratively with users to define security policies and management practices that met corporate requirements while still helping the company be productive. Users embraced IT as a source of knowledge and expertise, and Billys left IT alone.

Conclusion
While not every organization fits perfectly into one of these two camps of customers, I’ve found that it’s a good way to think about IT. More importantly, by illustrating these two types of organizations, it becomes quite clear who the superior organization is. Billy Opportunists understand the meaning of user-oriented IT. In fact, they are the ones who invented user-oriented IT. Billy Opportunists see end users in a different way than Billy Haters, and by treating them like a customer, they effectively became an integral part of the business. The business saw the Billy Opportunists as a money maker, and the Billy Haters as a black hole of cost.

Have a good story about Billy in your organization? Thoughts around Billy Haters and Billy Opportunists? I’d love to hear your comments.

3 Things to Look for in a User-Oriented IT Solution

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User-Oriented IT is more that handling the challenges of BYOD, it’s using the BYOD challenge to drive your IT operations and service organizations into a better model for achieving higher service levels and user satisfaction—a better model for maximizing user productivity and simplifying IT operations.

Oriented IT is a vision for providing all services, support, and resources people need — anywhere on any device. There are at least three things to look for in a User-Oriented IT solution. Each area addresses a different need within the IT organization. These three areas include:

  1. User-Oriented Management
  2. User-Oriented Licensing
  3. User-Oriented Freedom balanced with IT Control

The first, User-Oriented Management, refers to being able to look at a user within the management system and instantly know all the devices, applications, and resources assigned to that user Is it easy for you to click on a user object in your management system and see whether they have an Android or iOS device? Do you know what system it is running and then from the same object, see what laptop they have, what software they’re running and whether or not that software is in compliance? The benefit of User-Oriented Management is reducing the amount of time to solve problems and increasing the user productivity. This is especially helpful to the IT Administrators in their day-to-day activities.

User-Oriented Licensing, the second area, refers to future-proofing IT budgets. Buying fully integrated management solutions isn’t easy when they are based on the number of devices because it’s difficult to know how many devices users will bring into your work environment.  With User-Oriented licensing, you just have one SKU and that covers the user no matter how many devices they personally carry. That way the only thing that will increase your license count is if your business is growing and you’re adding additional users, which is a good problem to have. IT Directors and CIOs will appreciate the simplicity and the predictability of User-Oriented Licensing as they create the budgets each year for their organizations.

Finally, User-Oriented Freedom with IT Control means striking the right balance between allowing users to have whatever device, application, or service they need, while maintaining the integrity of IT resources and data. IT control also means leveraging better endpoint security, security compliance, power consumption, hardware optimization and consistency, licensing compliance, and change and release management. These added levels of control build greater trust in the overall IT organization.

User-Oriented IT is more that handling the challenges of BYOD, it’s using the BYOD challenge to drive your IT operations and service organizations into a better model for achieving higher service levels and user satisfaction—a better model for maximizing user productivity and simplifying IT operations.