by: VMware Chief Information Officer Jason Conyard
Technology is now woven into almost every aspect of our lives, no matter where you live. Mobile phones, tablets, wearable devices, and even voice-controlled personal assistants are pervasive. As consumers, we carry a rich technology experience in our pockets—our cell phones. It’s time that IT brings the same experience into our workplaces.
I suggest that this means changing our vocabulary to recognize that IT no longer serves users, a term that distinguishes those that use technology from those that don’t. Instead, professionally we should adopt alternatives to reflect that everyone in a company uses technology in some way as contributors to business success. At VMware, we say colleague.
Colleague is a term of respect. It encourages IT professionals to think about people in a more considered and thoughtful way. It signifies that IT is an enabler of people, not technology. While automation, AI, and machine learning can help us do things more quickly, the company’s future success lies with its people. People bring forth ideas, find opportunities, and solve problems. When we acknowledge that we work together for common goals, that IT is here to enable the company to succeed, and that the company is a collection of people, it’s a game changer.
What does that mean from a practical perspective? It means that if you genuinely believe that IT shows up at work to enable our colleagues to do their best work and have a great experience with technology, then different things become important. Should we still be mindful of cost? Yes. But it is incredibly naive to focus on the cost of fixing a technology issue when it’s really about whether a person or a team’s productivity is affected.
A good example is the VMware service desk. We decided not to look at our service as a requirement of doing business and minimize the cost per ticket. Instead, our view is that the service desk exists to enable our colleagues to do their best work. Our service desk is responsible for providing fellow colleagues with a delightful technology experience and getting them to be productive as quickly as possible.
If you think of your fellow employees as your peers and refer to them that way, it follows that IT as an organization should be far more integrated. Traditional IT has been arranged in silos—infrastructure, security, desktop support, applications, etc.—with experts in certain areas. This model was good from a stability perspective when the priority was making sure systems were up and running.
The advent of consumerization, mobile, cloud and virtual technologies has changed that paradigm. System uptime is still a priority, but operations are typically more stable. That opens the door for IT to take the next step and think about how its systems are joined up horizontally. It’s no longer good enough to say that an HR app is working when a colleague can’t access it because the VPN is down, or for a colleague to say her laptop is working, but she can’t connect to the cloud email system.
IT’s opportunity is to look at its services holistically, from the colleague’s perspective. That means measuring our success by colleague productivity and experience, instead of simply system uptime.
It’s also time for me to search for a new team name as End User Services doesn’t cut it anymore. I’d like to hear your suggestions on a new team name and how other organizations refer to their employees.
To read more about how VMware IT is improving the agility of its employees, click here.
To learn more, attend VMworld 2018 session LDT3196, Top 5 Operational Changes Organizations Overlook When Implementing EUC.
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