End User Experience
Learn 5 Ideas for Profiting from a Positive End User Experience
The 4th annual Texas Technology Summit has come and gone. The topic for the event was "What is the IT Landscape going to look like in 5 years?" but honestly the majority of the people we spoke to spent more time talking about what was hurting their IT department, and the businesses they work for, today.
For Whitehat, the Texas Technology Summit was a great event. The response we received at the show tells me what we are talking about and doing is a real need in the market right now.
Our “Profiting from a Positive End User Experience” presentation struck a positive chord with the people we met. You could see audience members nodding their heads in agreement as we talked about the issues we see on a regular basis in the field.
There are some companies out there that do not have the tools to see what is really happening in their Citrix/VMware environment. We met with companies that have Support Desks under a heavy burden with heavy ticket loads. The overall message I got from talking to 200 or so people Wednesday was “We are short on time and staff, we have some problems that we do not understand, we have some short term fixes that works, but we need some resolution. Our apps are more complex and we need more proactive it management”
You could hear the frustration in their voice as they talked about problems that were in the visibility gap between VMware and Citrix. They were tired of the fact that their best solution to fix Citrix was to blow away the end users profile to temporarily fix the issues. They have no proactive it managment, they know that they are no closer to fixing the underlying problem, and have no idea where to begin.
We met with an IT Director of a municipality that is suffering from a case of what we call “NoTicket-it is.” He has the exact opposite problem. His end users complain to each other when they have performance problems (statistics say that an average end user will have an issue 8 times before calling the Support Desk unless the issue is critical) but do not open a ticket to get the issue addressed.
Instead the complaints travel via grapevine until business management confronts the CIO with news that their end users are not happy with the network environment. The CIO checks with the Support Desk, finds no tickets, and frustration sets in. NoTicket-it is.
How do you fix problems you can’t see?
We had one new customer before our presentation was even complete!
We tackled a lot of serious questions, like:
- What is the quality of your company’s end user experience?
- How do you turn a reactive Support Desks flooded with tickets into a proactive Support Desk that can find and kill issues before end users open tickets?
- How do you know to what extent your end user experience is impacting the business one way or the other?
- How do you define metrics to measure the end user experience?
- How much does the quality of your end user experience impact your brand, your revenue, your morale and your profit?
- How do you find the spots where improving your end user experience could significantly move the needle?
Our collective experience in the virtualization/Citrix/VMware and Microsoft space brought us to the realization a long time ago that the ultimate metric that matters in any business is the End User Experience. If you can measure, track, and keep the end user experience in check, then things like CPU utilization, RAM utilization, network latency, while still important, become secondary.
If you are wrestling with how to find profit (or savings) through improving your own end user experience and more proactive it management along the way, the take away is this:
- Look at what level your IT department is monitoring and measuring the network today. If IT is just monitoring servers, storage, and network and doing event analysis, you do not have the tools to manage the end user experience today.
- To deliver proactive IT management that can identify and solve problems before end users know about them, you need tools that can capture the end user perspective and serve it up to your Support Desk in a meaningful way.
- The process to find profit or savings in your own environment begins by understanding what end users are actually doing with the systems and applications IT provides.
- Throw out that “align IT to the business” line from your vocabulary and understand IT is almost completely indistinguishable from the business itself in many cases. IT people are just standing in a different silo than the rest of the company.
- We should care less about server up time and more about what the end users need to be most effective while the servers are up.
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