by: VMware Senior Client Services Engineer/Client Services, Cy Whitfield
Enterprises naturally want employees to be productive, and employees want to enjoy their jobs. A key factor in meeting both demands is delivering the best digital experience possible. That is where the VMware IT Digital Experience Team comes into play. How our colleagues (our term for employees) use technology and their experience with it is what drives us. We fine comb every user interaction to always ensure an ideal experience. The more streamlined we can make it, the more productive and satisfied they will be.
Our efforts are broken into three distinct categories—digital experience, Oasis Store, and licensing.
Digital experience
This mandate includes documenting user experience to further improve features, dogfooding (using our own products prior to commercial release), beta builds, pipeline continuous integration / continuous delivery, advanced analytics, VMware Workspace ONE® Hub Services, and evaluating modern technologies/devices. On the human side, we document the experience of early adopters, partnerships with project managers, and surveys.
Digging deeper into some examples, we have an IT Early Adopters Program consisting of internal colleagues from various business units that help dogfood our products. These valuable insights enable us to partner with project managers (PMs) and deliver near real-time feedback that ultimately improves our products. On the advanced analytics side, VMware Workspace ONE® Intelligence™ powered by our Digital Experience Management tool offers superior analytics. This data is used to make everyday forecasting decisions, in addition to delivering performance metrics to capture issues and expedite troubleshooting.
Oasis Store
The Oasis Store is our internal tool used for procuring devices and peripherals. This has now become a single source of truth about what hardware is allowed and available in our various locations. It replaces various internal communication vehicles and word-of-mouth—while minimizing regional deviations. Its simple, easy-to-use interface belies the advanced technology in the background that integrates many processes/systems that would otherwise require manual interaction. This saves significant time and frustration for colleagues through the organization.
The store consolidates all regional ordering processes into a uniform procedure that takes into account required approvals, local stock and vendor contracts, and similar factors. There are constant additions and expansion of integrations with systems such as Workday, Coupa, other third-party vendors, and virtually anything that can automate backend processes. The goal is to cover every scenario, every possible deviation, and simplify/automate it for the requestor—all while ensuring corporate processes and guidelines are always followed.
Licensing
Technology moves at an insanely rapid pace, and in order to remain competitive enterprises must keep up. Unfortunately, the traditional corporate licensing process is often full of bureaucracy, causing adoption delays not to mention frustration.
Realizing this conundrum, our team enhanced the colleague experience and overall productivity by providing a simple and efficient way to obtain a software license. Now users are able to select even ‘trendy’ software products thanks to a streamlined procurement system that centralizes all VMware-licensed software assets under a common contract agreement.
Once a user places a request, automated access provisioning then kicks in, and if approved the requestor is up and running in no time. No long waits, no endless calls to tech support, no layer up layer of approvals. Plus, we streamlined licensing management processes to optimize usage and cost. This offers a great competitive advantage as VMware can adapt to modern technologies faster.
Contact us
There’s a lot more to this topic than is presented here. That’s why we encourage you to contact your account team to schedule a briefing with us. No sales pitch, no marketing. Just straightforward peer conversations revolving around your company’s unique requirements.
VMware on VMware blogs are written by IT subject matter experts sharing stories about our digital transformation using VMware products and services in a global production environment. To learn more about how VMware IT uses VMware products and technology to solve critical challenges, visit our microsite, read our blogs and IT Performance Annual Report and follow us on SoundCloud, Twitter and YouTube. All VMware trademarks and registered marks (including logos and icons) referenced in the document remain the property of VMware.
