Taking an operational view of IT with like-minded partners fuels forward momentum and real productivity gains for organizations able to benefit from lessons learned and avoid mistakes discovered in other environments

Remote work is here to stay. It’s a fact.

The work-from-anywhere global movement has set new IT requirements for companies, with 80 percent of American employees estimated to continue working remotely at least one day a week (via Owl Labs). So, how are some companies continuing to scale and support growth with these growing demands on their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments?

Efficiency. A company that can learn from the wins and mistakes of others is in a better position to control costs, deliver more productive hours to employees with less downtime, innovate faster, and win. As all companies grow, technology purchasing decisions and even end-user productivity are impacted by two differing views of IT from outside partners — either a Consultative or an Operational View of IT. The subtle differences between them can result in one company being more competitive.

What's the difference, who wins . . . and why? Companies lean on outside consulting partners to help scale their businesses. Those partners help IT executives make critical technical and business decisions impacting long-term costs. Whom you engage frequently determines your efficiency.

CONSULTATIVE VIEW

The Consultative View partner is incented to focus on short-term fixes and wins. Frequently reactive to immediate VDI environment issues or related to new builds, they're inversely passive about preventing future outages or complaints and lax on user experience improvements. Communication is commonly geared toward driving purchase decisions or minimally meeting the warranty period on their systems. Future outages can lead to future project revenue.

This approach is usually sales-driven, can require more frequent capital investment, with improvements coming in response to emergencies as much as planned engagements. Companies engaging with partners that take a Consultative View can be caught in an expensive sales loop as part of their budget cycle, hampering their scaling efficiency and the momentum IT and technology can provide its organization.

OPERATIONAL VIEW

The Operational View partner takes the long view tempered with experience, looking beyond simply surviving a warranty period to more subtle elements often overlooked. What will it cost to staff for a new application or skills requirement? Does it make sense to train that talent internally, hire for it, or outsource it? What complexity does the new technology add to the environment in terms of reliability and ongoing support? What has been the positive/negative impact in other environments? What impact will this technology have on end-users? Will it potentially change response times, average mean time to repair, or other key performance indicators? Will supporting this new application increase ticket counts or run the risk of escalating to specialists on project teams and risk slowing down important company initiatives?  

Partners taking an Operational View understand that acquiring and implementing a new technology or application is only the beginning. Any new technology must be managed and maintained effectively to achieve its fundamental purpose within the organization, realize an ROI, and work to the organization's benefit. Regardless of department size, there is a finite amount of work that can be done by support or project team members. Taking an operational perspective, metrics like staff utilization play an increasingly important role in determining actual support costs and how much work a team can take on before additional resources are needed. This approach views the company's operations, empowering IT to be at the forefront of scaling opportunities for internal process automation, end-user experience, employee effectiveness, and bottom line profitability. Companies that engage Operational View partners can often streamline internal processes from end-user feedback, support ticket data, NetPromoter Scores (NPS), and cross-company lessons learned, giving them a competitive advantage to scale faster through Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

VDI is all about securely delivering applications to end-users and giving them a great user experience to maximize productivity.

Companies that align with Operational View partners gain a competitive edge by understanding patterns in the data revealed by end-user activity — often through support tickets. These partners are actively participating in the VDI environment.  They're able to:

• Identify where the user experience (What's broken?)
• Diminish repetitious (Why is this happening frequently?)
• Downgrade the support ticket level (How can this be automated?)
• Improve end-user experience with (Can we shorten the steps?)
• Avoid missteps, take advantage of lessons learned and avoid known problematic solutions

Operational View partners are continually refining the system to maximize user workflow, improve their experience while in the VDI environment, look for patterns within the support data available, and make recommendations to empower the users to resolve issues themselves with automated solutions.

Break less, scale faster

We know "move fast and break things," but most companies are at the "break less and scale faster" stage. Keeping your VDI environment running smoothly is critical to your business. The goal: maximum uptime, fewer end-user disruptions, and preventative measures for future outages. Not all managed VDI services providers embrace this view since it takes a diligent commitment to understand and properly review systems data to identify system weaknesses and ticket issue sources.

How can you identify Operational View partners? Look for these attributes:

• Are they internally incentivized to improve my business?
• Do their systems under management survive past their warranty periods?
• Do they recommend best practices that they've developed in-house from experience?
• Do they have fixed management fees with accountability for uptime?
• Do they initiate responsibility for support ticket improvements?
• Are they continually refining time, effort, and energy spent on ticket issues?

Two Views Comparison Chart

The Operational View is dedicated and intentional. The Consultative View is an external partner default because it's rooted in passivity and reactivity. From this IT View Comparison Chart, it's more obvious how distinctly different these subtle differences are to company growth.

Embracing the Operational View Lens

There's much more to effective VDI management beyond emergency support, tactical advice, and essential planning and implementation of your environment. Scaling comes from seeing operational impact now and down the road. Real-world production environment experience coupled with some ability to foresee and predict future issues and implement preventative course corrections in anticipation is a crucial difference that sets Operational View VDI management partners apart. Their direct accountability for keeping systems running long-term with no downtime develops trust with end-users. Their recommendations are realistic, including the following:

• Recommendations are often aggregated from knowledge gained managing many different environments. Clients gain forward momentum from discoveries of new leading practices and side-stepping potential problems first discovered somewhere else.
• Recommendations are often arrived at more quickly because partners working from an operational perspective typically have first-hand knowledge of how client environments work.
• Recommendations can come from a deep well of internal technical knowledge on relevant topics, meaning the data needed to make sound decisions is available more quickly.

Their incentives align with yours. Driving efficiency is a focal point; they want to be very efficient, prevent tickets where possible, and solve problems fast to make end-users more productive. This added efficiency, in turn, allows them to maximize the number of people their support teams can cover successfully while also keeping your employees productive and efficient.

Operational View Example – Difference Between What Works Now vs. What Works Every Day

A consulting firm or hired gun may implement a VDI environment that has an initial login time of 20 seconds. However, over time, with new Microsoft patching, updates, group policy, and security changes, login times can and usually do drift upward to 45 seconds, 90 seconds or several minutes in extreme cases.

Six months later, the organization is leaking productive time and efficiency at a run rate of $400-$1,800 per employee per year, considering the average fully burdened labor rate in June 2021 for private industry (removing government jobs) was $36.64 per hour.

This Issue and many like it involving inconsistent VDI performance over time are prime examples of problems that get identified, resolved, and resolved again if they come back when viewed through an Operational lens.

MetricNet, an expert at support desk metrics, reveals through their annual benchmarking research that taking an Operational View of IT pays tangible productivity gains for all employees, with 1^st Quartile support organizations, built and improved through continual refinement unlocking 3.5 days of end-user productivity vs. their 4^th Quartile counterparts. A 1st Quartile IT department creates about 17 hours of downtime per full-time employee (FTE) per year. A 4th Quartile department creates an average of 46 hours of downtime per FTE per year.

Beyond the unnecessary squandering of end-user productive time, taking an Operational View, looking for and resolving the root cause of issues, systematically improves the end-user experience and technology adoption. It also eliminates a potential source of contention in employee review surveys. They provide their own case studies for best practices, reference updates that they suggest based on how they've seen them make bottom-line improvements, and understand implications of changes on production hardware using actual data directly.

Success Leaves Clues

Operational View IT partners’ dedication to process improvement, disaster planning, system longevity, and greater overall efficiency is evident from their proven track record. When vetting them, you'll notice that Operational View IT partners:

• Manage full environments - Servers, Storage, Network, Apps & End Users
• Align goals with business results rather than just technical fixes
• Invoke accountability in ensuring consistent long-term uptime
• Recommend improvements based on your company's future scaling plans
• Propose operationally-proven best practices
• Drive efficiencies within your organization

We understand the VDI difference.

At Whitehat Virtual Technologies, we make it easy for your end-users to work from anywhere with a seamless managed VDI experience. Most companies aren't leveraging the transformative power of technology because they perceive it to be too costly, complex, or they have yet to find their Operational View partner.

We understand how frustrating it is when IT gets in the way of your company's ability to scale. We remove technology, skill set, and geographic barriers so you can turn IT into a competitive advantage. As your VDI partner, we help your employees and end-users work efficiently from anywhere, save money while enhancing overall productivity, and increase your profitability to help you grow long-term. Most clients' problems are fixed before they ever knew there was an issue. See why clients continue to select Whitehat Virtual Technologies as their technology services partner, ranking Whitehat as a top 100 MSP, and connect with us today at www.WhiteHatVirtual.com.

Stop losing revenue from an underperforming VDI environment. You deserve a work-from-anywhere solution and IT environment that's easy to manage, delivers a great end-user experience, and allows you to efficiently scale your profits.

Schedule a 15-minute call today!