If you have been keeping track of LANDesk you will have noticed that we are passionate about User-Oriented IT.  For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of User-Oriented IT, let me provide you with a quick backgrounder. For much of IT’s history, devices were the central focus in management. In the last few years, a host of new challenges have arrived that have shaken things up. BYOD, multiple devices, increasingly mobile employees, and tech savvy end users are a few examples. These new dynamics have come on the scene as the demand for secure management, device management, full compliance and high user productivity are taking center stage in the IT management discussion. We believe that these changes have initiated a new period where the end user is the central focus or ultimate endpoint. User-Oriented IT is about keeping the end user at the center, while balancing flexibility with the demands of IT control.

This week, our focus has been on secure user management and its ability to help IT gain control in delivering services. This concept is a key part of bringing a User-Oriented IT approach to your enterprise. Through LANDesk’s Total User Management and Secure User Management solutions, every enterprise can have a clear view of their IT operations and a consistent user experience.

LANDesk gives you all the pieces to better manage, secure, support and maximize productivity for any user, anywhere, using any device or application.

Here are some of the ways that LANDesk‘s User-Oriented IT approach empowers you:

• LANDesk offers one price per end user, no matter how many devices are managed (including BYODs).
• LANDesk’s patented “Targeted Multicast” is the only solution recommended by analysts for distributed users.
• LANDesk offers the world’s fastest software and patch management.
• LANDesk has an integrated solution for systems management, endpoint security, mobility and ITSM for premise, cloud, or for both.
• LANDesk manages anything there ever was, anything there ever will be. This means we coexist with and actually fix competitors’ weaknesses.

Isn’t it time we had a conversation on User-Oriented IT? What are your thoughts on secure management and User-Oriented IT?  Let’s get the conversation started.

KCS is more about having the right people than it is about having the right processes. That starts with employing people who care about not just solving the customer’s issue but taking the time to capture it.

I have worked within support teams for half my life, and I’ve experienced many changes over the years.  In essence support remains the same: helping someone who needs technical assistance. However, the way we go about it has become both easier and more challenging in equal measures.  Expectations have gone up, (unfortunately I no longer receive a bunch of flowers just for helping someone to clear up their hard disk!), but technology improvements have also enabled us to use our time much more efficiently.

In the past, I have worked for support organizations where it has felt so busy that we had no time for anything other than working through “the backlog.”  I now realize that we were so focused on reactive support that we didn’t realize quite how much we could benefit from stepping away from this to put some of our efforts into proactively creating a knowledge repository.

At LANDesk, we make sure that our support organization looks at success as being not just fixing issues or answering questions once, but also effectively making use of what we’ve learned during that process.  We do this by working closely with the Development teams to highlight areas where we feel we should focus on improving product quality and the user experience.  Another area in which we put extra emphasis is on creating and improving knowledge content which enables our customers, partners, and support teams to find their own solutions.  This is where my role comes in.

The knowledge sharing methodology which we have invested in is called Knowledge Centered Support (KCS).  It made sense to us that every problem we solve is potentially some new information that should be easily captured so that it can be reused again.  Over the years I have seen first-hand that the shift has gone from being asked the same questions repeatedly to receiving less volume but each question of a greater complexity.  This brings its own challenges, but I feel a sense of relief that the experience I had when starting in support of picking up the phone to repeat the same set of steps multiple times a day has now gone.

With KCS it has been a learning process about what works and what doesn’t.  Most of all what we have learned is that KCS isn’t something you can implement and then leave alone.  It’s something which needs constantly tweaking, emphasizing, and learning from.

We’ve also learned that KCS is more about having the right people than it is about having the right processes.  That starts with employing people who care about not just solving the customer’s issue but taking the time to capture it.  It also extends right up to the management team knowing that who they should value within their organization are not just the heroes who can rescue a bad situation but those who can explain the steps that they took so that they can be understood and followed again.

Here are tips of things that have worked for us:

• Be as transparent as you dare.  If people know who wrote a piece of knowledge content they can thank them or ask them to clarify something.  The author can also feel some pride in what they’ve written.  People love seeing that an article they’ve written has helped someone else to be successful.  It spurs them on to write some more.
• Team-based targets rather than individual targets.  At LANDesk Support we can all see what individual contribution our colleagues have made and this helps to encourage some competitive streaks.  However the targets we set are all team-based.  This means that close colleagues will all work to improve the content together rather than trying to keep the best information for themselves.
• Some knowledge is better than no knowledge.  Yes, you should set some guidelines and you should have some processes to maintain the quality level.  Ensure that you don’t have too many rules and they aren’t too strict.  If it’s an unpleasant or lengthy experience for the knowledge author they won’t want to go through it again, and there’s always plenty of other things they could be doing instead.
• Make recognition both fun and official.  By following KCS, we recognize only when a piece of knowledge has been successfully used to solve a problem, not just that it was created.  Fun bobble-head trophies, competitions, and scoreboards all work well to give recognition to people who have made extra efforts with knowledge sharing.  What works even better is if top knowledge contributors are also more likely candidates for official employee recognition and are often the first to be considered for promotion.
• Keep training and coaching.  Don’t just send an email or update a document when your processes change, people don’t always read them or remember what they’ve read.  Invest some time in meeting with individuals as often as you can to talk about how things work, how they are working, and what steps can be taken to be even better.  Meet with new starters as a part of their induction process but don’t forget the people who have been in the team a long time who may need to rethink the way they work.
• Mindset is important.  People need to understand that in order to write a great knowledge article you don’t need to be an expert.  You just need to identify a knowledge gap and know enough to be able to fill it.  A well-written knowledge article from a new member of staff can sometimes be of equal value as a whitepaper written by an expert on that topic.

We are still learning and can identify many places where we still want to improve.  What we do feel now is that we truly have the commitment and recognition for knowledge sharing as an important part of what we do as a department.  We believe that with this in place the rest will come one step at a time.

In order to fully implement User Oriented IT, you first need to understand that different users have different user requirements. As a result, you need to develop your interactions with your users accordingly.

When talking about IT users, these days we frequently default to office workers and their need for BYOD. From an IT support standpoint, there are many other workers that need to be considered. User Oriented IT is all about IT from the users perspective and users of IT are a diverse bunch.

If I look at my own experiences, I’ve spent many years working in retail management, a social services environment, and even in the engineering and manufacturing environment of thermocouples for passenger planes. In these environments, users aren’t concerned about bringing their own devices to work or access to cloud storage.

Take for example the experience in retail. Seasonal sales time is a high pressured time of year when you need everything and everyone on top of their game and if things go wrong they need to be resolved quickly. Now normally throughout a day if you have an IT incident you would phone the service desk, enter a queue to have your call logged by first line support, and expect a phone call back later in the day based on categorization and prioritization. However in the context of retail, the IT team understands that start of the day is an exception to this rule. If a sales manager cannot open the systems in the morning then it can ruin a day’s takings, impact the weekly targets, and also affect a sales team’s seasonal bonus. So if you have an IT incident first thing in the morning, you are routed to a service desk team that logs your call and fixes the issue straight away. In this case IT has understood the context of the environment the user operates in and adjusted their processes to match the user’s needs.

At work, I would use a PC to access and print out sales reports to analyze what needs to change for the next hours trading – from changing staffing numbers or moving best-selling products to prominent areas. As a sales manager this is what I need from IT to do my job. Back at headquarters, the data is reported in different ways to match their own user requirements. From the same data, decisions about stock can be made by buying teams but also IT can review peak selling times and the number of transactions going through tills.

One change that was made in past years as part of this capacity analysis by IT was that during Sales periods, IT came on site and installed temporary point of sale tills to increase our transactional capacity. From the user (my sales teams) perspective, this was a godsend as having long queues of grumbling customers at cash registers which they could do nothing about was a frustrating user experience. At headquarters, they were happy to increase the number transactions going through the cash registers.  There are many other examples such as work around when till points freeze which may normally be a call to the service desk, but in sales time this is not practical and frustrating for users so work around emergency codes are issued to shop floor staff to solve their own issues at peak time again a change is made to the IT interaction based on the context.

Working within social services, the lifeline of the social workers was the database of child records. In this context the biggest concern for users of IT was not speed of IT action and reaction but access and security of records for data protection. For example, if the service desk interacts with a social worker to log an Incident in this environment they need to ensure that the service desk shields or does not record any confidential child data from the database. Similarly the IT teams need to ensure that they impenetrable to data breaches or malware that could wipe out data on which a child’s safety depends. In the engineering/manufacturing environment I worked in, what was important to the end user was the ability to keep accurate records and pull those records up at a moment notice.

In order to fully implement User Oriented IT, you first need to understand that different users have different user requirements. As a result, you need to develop your interactions with your users accordingly. When you take into account the diverse needs of users by placing their needs in the context of their environment, you’re on your way to meeting their needs.

User Oriented IT is not limited to what we can accomplish in the workplace, but what we could accomplish in our personal and business lives—regardless of where in the world we are located.

Back in April, I decided to take some time off and take a backcountry backpacking trip in Zion National Park in southern Utah with a good friend of mine from Italy. This was the first time in a very long-time that I have taken a vacation without packing up the kids and standing in the TSA security line and dealing with the challenges of modern air travel. This trip was intended to “refresh” my mind and decompress from the modern world. It appeared to me though that even though this trip was an “unplugged” trip with no cell phone coverage or internet connection, it would be far from the days of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

I realized that as a modern user of technology my needs have changed and how I use technology has definitely changed. When I packed my 40 pound backpack, it included a modern GPS so we wouldn’t get lost, my fully charged iPAD with topographical maps (I did have a paper map as well), and my iPhone so I could take pictures along our route and once we had sell phone signal I could upload them Facebook. One night as I was enjoying a fabulous Italian Pasta meal my buddy made in the backcountry that I realized that this whole thing around User Oriented IT was not limited to what we can accomplish in the workplace, but what we could accomplish in our personal and business lives—regardless of where in the world we are located.

Adam Smith’s last blog article User Oriented IT Conversation In Red Rock Country is a great example of what can be accomplish by your workforce if they are given the freedom and flexibility to do their jobs. We had a group of product managers, product marketing managers, and user interface designers working on their laptops, tablets, and smart phones from the desert outside Moab, Utah.

Users are eager to be productive, but we cannot place constraints on them such as requiring employees to be physically in the office each workday, setting defined “working hours,” controlling what devices they work on, or how they get their applications. As business leaders and managers, we need to look for ways to balance the need for User Freedom while still maintaining a reasonable set of controls.

User Oriented IT is about 1) providing your end users an environment that they feel they can do their job without “feeling” the controls IT placed on them, 2) allowing them the freedom to use the device they are most comfortable using while working on applications they are most productive using, and 3) the flexibility to work from the coffee shop, from home, the office or from a tent in the desert.

It’s the 1-2-3 way to Unleash the Power of Your Workforce!

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If you would like to learn more about User Oriented IT, LANDesk’s CEO, Steve Daly will be presenting at Gartner IT Infrastructure and Operation Management Summit in Orlando, Florida on the June 18, 2013.

Even though I haven’t rollerbladed in 15 years, I decided to go for a spin last weekend. It will be fun, I thought. I’ll take the dog and let my daughter follow along on her bike. What could possibly go wrong?

Last weekend I decided to go for a spin on my rollerblades. It will be fun, I thought.  I’ll take the dog and let my daughter follow along on her bike.  What could possibly go wrong?

I should probably preface this story with the fact that I haven’t been rollerblading in about 15 years and the skates are just as old.  I failed to see the need for knee pads or elbow pads, so I left them in the car. Two sore wrists, a skinned knee, and one bruised elbow later saw me walking back to the car with broken skates.

The mistake I made was not taking the time to refresh my skills.  Instead of spending time on the basics, learning the route, and taking a few practice runs with a friend who’s done the route before, I put on the skates and hoped for the best.

Unfortunately, many customers make similar mistakes when implementing enterprise software.  Can you simply install the product and figure it out as you go?  Sure, but you’ll risk missing some key design components that could be the difference between seeing a quick ROI with the product and struggling with basic configuration issues.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been told “I don’t know what I don’t know” when it comes to working with our products.  Customers would purchase the software, read a few configuration whitepapers, and dive into the setup.  Once they solved their immediate business problem though, they wanted more information and they attended one of our training classes.  Unfortunately, after the training they realized that their environment needed optimization and in some cases a redesign if they wanted to get the full value out of the products. While they were grateful for the classes, they were frustrated that so much time was wasted on an inadequate solution.

I made it my mission to design a package that allows customers to feel confident that they have a solid design, optimized configuration, and one that allows them to focus on learning the software and developing a roadmap for their implementation. I wanted to give them a resource they could use to talk through their challenges.  Someone who is focused on their environment and their success.

Since new customers are not experts on LANDesk, they don’t always know what they need.  They know the problems they want to solve, but they are looking for a professional to help them sort through their options. This was the genesis of the LANDesk Accelerator programs.  Each Accelerator includes training, implementation services, and a technical advisor.  By offering the combined package, we can also include a discounted price that we wouldn’t normally be able to provide.

As standard practice, we recommend that customers attend the training in advance of service dates.  This ensures they have more detailed knowledge of how each component functions and you can make informed decisions about the design of the system.  A technical advisor is also involved during the design phase and provides one-on-one assistance with best practices, advice, and the implementation roadmap.

Since its launch, we have seen a lot of success with the Accelerator packages. Customers are achieving a much quicker ROI, they are adopting more components within the suite of products, and they are seeing immediate value from their LANDesk investment.  In fact, the deployments are going so smoothly that customers are purchasing TAM contracts because of the value their technical advisor is bringing to their organization.  From an expert focused on your environment, to an internal resource at LANDesk who can speak with support, engineering, and even sales on your behalf, it’s hard not to see their value.

As for me, I’ll continue creating packages that help customers become successful with our products.  My rollerblading skills are another story.  I’ve planned a shopping trip to replace the skates, set up a series of lessons and introductory outings with a friend, and have high hopes that I’ll be back on the lake trails in no time.  With any luck my future crashes will be much less spectacular.

Enterprise mobility deployed at this airport terminal gate. Photo by Robert DeStefano

Like you, I check email on my mobile phone.  I also have my tablet set up to access my work email.  I also frequently watch the way technology is used around me.  I can’t resist the urge to note the brand of barcode scanner being used by the retail clerk, or the payment terminal where I swipe my credit card for payment.  I notice the rugged mobile computers carried by the postal courier and the one used by my heating oil service technician.  Yes, I acknowledge my enterprise mobility geekdom.

The activities I’ve noted are all obvious points where mission critical enterprise mobility happens.  A transaction is occurring between a business and a customer.  A supply chain workflow is completed.  What is less obvious are the ways that mobility is enabling enterprise productivity in places and ways that aren’t so obvious.

Earlier this month I was flying to Asia, but had a nearly five-hour stopover at a US international airport.  When I arrived at my gate, I saw a twenty-first century airport waiting area – equipped with Wi-Fi access (free if I completed a brief survey conducted by the provider).  There was bar and table seating throughout the gate area, and each seat was within reach of both AC and USB charging connections.  What was most exciting, was that at virtually every seat was an iPad tablet secured to a stand and free to use.  Using the iPad to browse the internet and check my email would certainly help me pass the hours between flights.

However, something even more productive happened: on the iPad was a dining app for the restaurant located at the gate.  I easily navigated the app and ordered breakfast—complete with cappuccino.  Once I made my selections, I swiped my credit card at the card reader located next to the iPad on the counter, signed for my payment on the iPad screen, and provided my email address within the app so that I could receive a copy of my receipt.  Within 10 minutes, I was enjoying my breakfast.

Think about this scenario for a moment: Over 100 tablets at a single gate (meaning thousands around this airport terminal), with a mission-critical enterprise application pre-loaded on each one.  Each tablet is touched by tens of people each day.  This is a prime example of the expanding reach of enterprise mobility.  Enterprise mobility is no longer limited to mobile computers in the hands of company employees.  This solution replaced the point-of-sale restaurant ordering system and checkout machine with a familiar device, allowing the customer to perform these tasks for the company.

Take a look around at the technology next time you’re out and about—enterprise mobility is happening everywhere.  Every time you scan a QR barcode in an advertisement, use your smartphone to present your airline boarding pass, or make a restaurant reservation from your mobile device, enterprise mobility is happening.  Each experience is a chance for businesses to interact with you, their customer, and a chance to conduct a mission-critical transaction.

Is your company taking advantage of this incredible opportunity?

A comprehensive Mobile Application Management solution needs to deliver, secure, and enable applications across any mobile device platform or form factor without modifying the original application.

This blog has an ambitious title, but I think it is accurate. Let me explain why. The recent definition of Mobile Application Management (MAM) focuses on delivering and securing native apps on mobile devices. These features typically include app wrapping and app distribution. While that’s as extensive as many smart device operation systems allow, Wavelink has a far more comprehensive and compelling feature set.

For more than 20 years, Wavelink has developed products and technologies that have enabled companies to deliver their operational applications to the ever-evolving set of mobile devices that are optimally designed for the task at hand. Let me give an example.

For high transaction processes like picking or sorting in a supply chain logistics operations, companies have host-based applications that need to be displayed on a variety of mobile devices. They do not want to have to add custom logic to the application to handle the different form factors or device drivers needed to access peripherals such as bar code scanners, radios, or printers. This is the market where Wavelink application management solutions exist. The solutions are built for telnet based applications, web applications, and native console applications executing on the server. They take these applications and expose them on any mobile device taking into account form factors, driver integration, security, session persistence, latency, unstable wireless networks, and a variety of others issues the application developer doesn’t want to know about and certainty doesn’t want to handle differently for each device. Wavelink solutions are designed to handle these problems without modifying the original application. This enabling of applications across the mobile devices is unique to the MAM solution Wavelink provides.

In summary, a comprehensive Mobile Application Management solution needs to deliver, secure, and enable applications across any mobile device platform or form factor without modifying the original application. This is why Wavelink is the world’s foremost Mobile Application Management Company.

Firstly, to be clear, I’m a big supporter of all things BYOD and Consumerization. I think that we are all increasingly bringing our own expectation of a consumer standard of IT experience into the workplace, both with the devices we buy and the applications we use. It’s not only the future, it’s also the present in many organisations already. And it soon will be the norm for almost all of us. I wrote some rather passionate words about this here. In summary, to me, consumerization is an “expectation” that the employee brings into work from their home life. We are increasingly seeing a shift not only to BYOD and the use of personal devices for work purposes, but also – lets call it - BYOS (Bring Your Own Services) where personal-use software and services come with the employee in preference to using the “corporate tools.” You know the one – “I’d rather use Gmail than my work mail.” “I’d rather use Prezi than Powerpoint.” “I’d rather use my iPad than this weird heavy black windows laptop from 5 years ago.” And the IT industry is wringing it’s hands and fretting over this sea change. Google “BYOD” and your screen is filled with Chicken Littles calling that the IT sky is falling in, and that the move to consumer devices and services is also a move away from getting value from corporate IT.

So far, so good. But here’s where I’m now starting to wonder if the future of corporate IT support might not be quite as shiny and “consumer” as we all think. As the article points out, the downside of the free/cloud/personal consumer apps and services is a very very low level of support service. It’s not surprising. Increasingly we are used to using “free” services to create, store and communicate, and as is occasionally pointed out, those service providers up there in the consumer cloud do make lots of money from their customers. But we – the happy freeloading consumer – are not “the customer.” The customer is the advertiser or marketer who is paying megabucks to those cloud services for your search history, your email keywords, your Facebook likes and interests. Remember: If it is FREE, then the business providing it is making money by selling you to their customer. You are not the customer, you are the product being “sold.”

Now, that’s kind of OK. I don’t mind. It’s a fair trade. I’m not trying to get all antsy about the selling of myself to the “the man,” and freedom and liberty. It’s a deal I enter into to get that great email, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

And it’s not just the free ones either. Ever tried getting personal support for your Evernote subscription? Your Dropbox subscription? Heck, even on your broadband? I have a horror story that would turn your stomach about the disdain and insignificance that public consumers receive from some broadband suppliers. Life is tough as a consumer. We don’t want to pay much, and so, if things don’t work, we are stuck.

But back to consumerisation and BYOD and BYOS. We may expect a consumer standard working experience, but we demand a corporate standard of support experience when things dont work. People may mock their internal IT support team struggling to cope with an influx of products and services from “out there,”　but when they contact IT Support they always get: A reference number, probably an email, usually a human voice, sometimes a visit, sometimes remote control, often advice and guidance. And in the corporate space, if they don’t get that, they kick and scream because IT are not doing their job.

You see, the internal IT support may not know everything, they may struggle sometimes, they may drop the ball sometimes, but they remain very focused above all else on that one important point: Keeping the employee or enduser working and productive. And that is the trick of the tale in consumerisation. 　Although it brings great new technology and ability to the business, the business will absolutely refuse to accept a woeful “consumer standard” of support. They expect – need – a corporate/private/personal “traditional” level of care and support.

And that is why the heroes and heroines in the help desk and the service desk should all be able to sleep the good sleep at night. Their jobs and futures are very secure. Yes, BYOD and consumerization brings new challenges, but, hey, we love a challenge right? More importantly, it brings even clearer value and recognition to the IT support role. They need you, they need your help, and that is not going to change, no matter how shiny their next new toy is.

Note: This blog was originally posted at HDIConnect. Reprinted with permission.

The LANDesk Management Suite and Security Suite release coming this summer was code named Balanced Rock. Here is a picture of our Product Management team and a few others standing under Balanced Rock in Arches National Park.

Sometimes we like to mix a little fun with our work at LANDesk. A few weeks a ago, our Product Management Team took their motor homes and camping trailers and headed to the red rock country of Moab for a few days. The goal was to plan out a future product releases that fit into our Secure User Management Solution.

What Does User-Oriented IT Mean to You?

During the planning session, we talked a lot about User-Oriented IT and the requirements this vision will drive in the next level of features in LANDesk’s Total User Management and Secure User Management Solutions. One exercise we went through asked the question of the team, “What does User-Oriented IT mean to you?” We mapped out different phrases and themes from this exercise and we got a pretty good idea of what Product Management thinks. I’d like to ask the same question of our Blog readers, “What does User-Oriented IT mean to you?” We’d really like you to be a part of this ongoing User-Oriented IT discussion.

Are Users More Tech-Savvy or Is Technology More User-Oriented?

Part of the conversation around User-Oriented IT within the industry is that the new generation of workers is more tech-savvy than those of past generations. That notion perplexes me a bit. After we returned from a hike to Corona Arch (made famous with World’s Largest Rope Swing on YouTube), I put the question out to our Product Management team “Are users more tech savvy or has technology become more user-oriented?”

There were heavy arguments on both sides of this conversation. Someone pointed out that young people seem to know how to pick up anything and get how it works. Another countered that the technology is getting to the point where anyone can pick up a device and get how it works.  I think it was our User Experience guy that said it was a convergence of both. Think of the Smartphones and tablets today, a child or an older person who doesn’t use computers can pick them up and easily get how to interact with the technology. Another point made was to take a look at how teenagers are often the power users and utilize so many different social apps in order to communicate. In fact, there seems to be a constant shift and evolution in what apps are popular. So I again invite you to comment, “Do you think the next generation of workers is more tech-savvy or is the technology is getting more user-oriented?”

Does User-Oriented IT Mean a Shift in Power or Balance?

Finally, some within the Product Management group thought that User-Oriented IT is an example of the pendulum swinging a little too far over to the user and that there are plenty of things IT does that don’t really impact the user directly. I was quick to point out that within our User-Oriented IT story that isn’t the case. We realize there is a balance between user choice and freedom with IT control. There is a balance of what IT does for the infrastructure and delivery of business critical projects and giving users an experience where they can trouble-shoot, solve, and request services they need. So I offer you the following questions: Does User-Oriented IT give you the impression that the user gets more of the power or that there is a balance? How do you see User-Oriented IT playing out in your organization?

In the end, our Product Management team did a lot of planning, made important decisions about new features and defined much of what will be coming within the next couple Secure User Management releases. However, the conversation continues and we still want your input, so please comment on the following three questions we were debating in the Red Rock canyons of Moab:

1. What does User-Oriented IT mean to you?
2. Are users more tech-savvy or is technology becoming more user-oriented?
3. Do you think User-Oriented IT takes power away from IT or strikes a balance between the user and IT?

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.