Tenet #3 Focus on the user experience.

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1 Tenet #3 Focus on the user experience.

2 Tenet #3 Overview of the Tenet #3 Too often, IT is focused on the technologies themselves and not how we maximize the impact the investments have on the users and what they get from the technology. Let s face it, without users, your IT group has very little to do, especially since our organizations are heavily dependent on technology today and want more, not less in the future. IT departments are stewards of technology for our organizations and our users. And remember, as the saying goes, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In this case the beholder is the user, and the beauty we are referring to is the reputation of IT. Understand that users include employees, clients and other constituents such as supply chain partners or shareholders. Now, we believe that there are two areas where we must focus regarding the user experience. No piece of technology exists without at least one person leveraging it to get something done. The first is the client service or support element. For a majority of users, when they consider their organization s IT department, the degree to which they value IT is typically associated with the stability of the technology they use and the service they receive from IT when there;s a problem or question. To that point, it becomes pertinent that IT recognizes and places emphasis on delivering a high level of client service, not just technical support. IT needs to embrace and embody what one CIO calls the platinum rule, a step up from the golden rule. The golden rule says to treat others the way you want to be treated. The platinum rule says - treat others in a way that exceeds how they d like to be treated and wow them. Additionally, when recruiting, IT departments should prioritize client service-type orientation and skills vs. purely technical skills. Let s face it; it s a lot easier to teach technology to those with a strong client service orientation than the opposite. The second area of focus is strategic enablement. For most organizations, their largest strategic investment is in the people they employ to produce business success. User productivity is critical. Imagine if IT were compensated based purely upon how productive the users are; would we think, act, communicate, and deliver differently? The key to being very successful in providing IT services to the organization is to ensure that each and every user is achieving maximum productivity. Ask the extra questions: who are the user s that are impacted/or-to-be-impacted? And what are they trying to/do they need to accomplish? Remember, while it may not be obvious, we are all compensated (employed for that matter) based upon business results which come from user productivity anyways, so let s focus on that, whether it be in the way we support the technology OR in the way we design and integrate the technology solutions. To achieve your goals of AlwaysOn you should consider: 1. Understand users and their importance to the business. 2. Enable users to be more productive with appropriate technologies AND education. 3. Ensure maximum productivity by providing delightful client support.

3 5 Levers to get the Most From Users Now in focusing on the User Experience, we believe that there are essentially 5 levers that one must take advantage of in ensuring users have what they need to make money for the business. Your business exists to make money. All of your IT decisions should have that in mind, and if you can t justify the direct path to making money, then you should reconsider your request. Engagement Involve end-users early and often, in some cases you might even have to sell the users on investing their time. Why? Adoption means acceptance. Focus on User Needs - Not Technology Focus on their needs and use versus the technology, understanding that there are likely different kinds of users with different priorities. Why? Needs lead to solutions, IT provides solutions. Focus on needs. Training Ongoing end-user use specific training is a must. Ongoing being the key here. One and done does not scale or enable the users to their fullest potential. Why? You are not giving them a fish; you want them not only to learn how to fish but to help you build a bigger fish tank. Communication Less geek speak - more business language. Why? Better communication and understanding of the business = better client service. Metrics Establish a plan for measuring business process monitoring, user-experience monitoring, and enduser satisfaction and/or loyalty. Why? If you know what is broken, you can fix it and you keep your users happy.

4 Tenet #3: Success Stories To better understand the Focus on the user experience Tenet; what follows are a few case studies on how some are adopting this at their organizations. Case Study #1: Case Study #2: This highly regarded university, based in the northeastern USA, has 20,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students as well as faculty and staff of over 4,000. The university has several principal academic units (e.g. college, medical school, business school, etc.), each run somewhat independently. IT is distributed across this university in a federated model which allows each academic unit to apply technology to best meet its objectives and needs. One of their larger units looks after 8,000 faculty, staff and students all of who rely heavily on a wide range of home grown and commercial software systems to learn, conduct research, and perform other tasks. A significant number of these systems must be AlwaysOn and performing well for users. To focus on the user experience, 70 of 160 IT employees are members of the Support Services team (44%) who provide desktop services, helpdesk services, and assistance with student labs. This is a substantial number of resources to dedicate to the user experience. This $400M company designs, develops, and markets robots to the consumer, government, and industrial sectors. They were founded in 1990 and employ about 700 people. Their core expertise is engineering and innovation - they ve outsourced all manufacturing tasks. The IT department of about 20 people is responsible for back office type systems including their ERP, CRM, Portal and communications systems. There is very strong pull for more technology and integration between systems by their users; for example, integration between their product lifecycle management (PLM) and ERP systems. With such strong demand, IT works closely with users to ensure that technologies will improve processes allowing the company to sell more at lower costs. Before any software development is started, extensive process analysis takes place which is led by user teams. IT usually has just 1-2 people on a project. For their PLM-ERP integration project, they spent from January 2010 until mid-august 2010 on process analysis; software development is just getting started. They ve adopted IT Service Management discipline (ITSM) to increase their ability to manage systems, the underlying infrastructure and serve users in a consistent and more effective fashion. For those unfamiliar, ITSM is a set of processes that detail best practices to enable and optimize IT services in order to satisfy business requirements and manage the IT infrastructure both tactically and strategically. To deliver AlwaysOn systems, the IT staff use several technologies to monitor applications and systems. They also simulate user experience on several systems which is sometimes referred to as synthetic transaction monitoring.

5 Case Study #3: Case Study #4: TThis multi-billion dollar company is a worldwide leader in entertainment products and services. Innovation is central to their strategy as are operational efficiency and employee effectiveness. They have almost 6,000 employees. Their IT department of over 400 people is distributed in locations around the world. Historically, IT had a reputation of being the no department - no, you can t do this; no, you can t do that. As a result, IT personnel are not as well connected with their business as they d like to be. Moreover, the IT team has not really thought of themselves as being part of the business. They ve considered themselves separate from the business and have not done much in the way of promoting their accomplishments to the company, which didn t help their reputation. To change this, their CIO formed a cross functional taskforce to fuse IT with the business. The taskforce is working on an IT vision for Additionally, IT is working actively to change their mindset to IT is the business. IT is mandating the use of terminology to fuse with the business AND each other (there are no longer users only business or business partners people) and IT isn t to use acronyms. They found that not only do acronyms create confusion with business folks but also within IT. The taskforce has identified several high impact short term projects (60 days) to show IT that it can increase its value. For example, one project is called service catalogue which is to create a single, online system for the company to obtain IT resources rapidly (e.g. when a new employee starts work, their computer and mobile phone are ready, their account privileges are established, etc.). Founded over 100 years ago, this college is known for its classic liberal arts curriculum and strong academic programs in business and professional studies. More than 2,150 undergraduates choose among 39 majors and 44 minors and the college serves more than 700 graduate and continuing education students. A majority of students are residential. Students require access to and the Internet on a 24x7 basis. Registration systems must be available to enable enrollment, grades and payments. The institution provides alumni with lifetime to keep them more closely tied to the college for fund raising and advocacy. Their AlwaysOn imperative is for technology that enables enrollment, retention of students and staff, fund raising, and most importantly the delivery of a first class education keeping the institution competitive. The reputation of IT is something they want to improve. Their recently appointed CIO brings a strong client service orientation from prior non- IT executive roles. To enhance ITs reputation AND fuse IT with their user community, IT gained considerable participation from their business side (admin, faculty & staff) who have embraced the effort including tasks they have to complete. Moreover, IT has developed a client service orientation program being implemented over several months to shift perspective of IT staff to better serve faculty, students and administration as well as each other. This taskforce and subsequent actions by IT will go a long way to strengthen their reputation and fuse IT with the business.

6 Atrion Services As we ve shared the AlwaysOn Imperative and the AlwaysOn Philosophy, the community continues to ask what is it that Atrion can specifically do to help. Beyond fostering the interaction and collaboration that goes in to making the AlwaysOn Philosophy real for you, we have created, and will continue to create services centered on this philosophy. Our new Business Analysis Service helps a company to develop a plan to better fuse technology with their business using a structured approach. This includes articulating business requirements - financial/quantitative and qualitative; reviewing key work processes and flows, examining existing technologies for further exploitation, and user proficiency for key applications. For new technologies being recommended, lifecycle cost projections are made. We offer several Assessment Services (e.g. virtualization, SharePoint, exchange, UC, wireless, etc.) as well as Project Services all of which incorporate business requirements and user proficiency goals and plans. For many clients, maxtime Services are a significant portion of their costs for delivering key applications and underlying equipment (servers, networks, etc.) that are AlwaysOn. Our maxtime enhancements allow us to monitor critical applications such as , Internet, SharePoint, as well as business applications such as ERP, online banking or clinical health systems. We can help you monitor service levels you ve established within your company. Additionally, we can conduct what some call synthetic transactions. Where we log in as a user and test application functionality to ensure the user will have a high quality experience. This is especially effective for companies that must provide 24x7 performance for key applications but don t have staff to effectively cover nights and weekends. In this regard, we supplement your team. We also offer several enablement programs and services associated with leadership development, such as the Leadership Challenge.

7 QUICK REFERENCE CHECKLIST TENET #3 FOCUS ON THE USER EXPERIENCE ALWAYSON PROJECT GLOBAL SETTINGS (prior to starting any project) Review WebEx Session at in WebEx section View: Class notes for subject, deliverables, content and what could apply to your company General: The who, what, why and where of applying AlwaysOn to your company Calendar: Is this the right time for the next step Team Members: Is everyone ready, available and willing to do these tasks? TENET #3: FOCUS ON THE USER EXPERIENCE What is the goal of your business? Find a decision maker Support your team Focus Learn First Do you know what your business does? How do they measure it? How do they make money? What can t they do? Do you know the user experience? If not - learn what and WHY. Now that you found the decision maker, ask them Why? Why do they do what they do to make money? Then ask yourself How? How do I enable the business to succeed? Are you supporting your users? Or just fixing the breaks? Look into 10 ways that you are helping beyond break fix. Discuss with your management team. Now that you have the Why question answered, go back to your business contacts and see how your team, technology and actions fit into the ultimate question: Can we make more money? Now that you see the goals how are you (with your new business partners) going to reach those goals? Make sure everyone agrees on the path. How are you doing so far? Did you ask anyone? UPDATING AND TRACKING (perform regularly while project is in progress) Track Progress Maintain the Baseline Report Project Status Track your meetings with each department head: Are they on board? Are they looking for the next step? Are some more interested than others? How can you enable, inspire and energize all managers? Ensure you send the same message to everyone, from your direct reports to the CEO. If the message is different to each employee, then the final result will be more confusion than anything else. Don t forget that Marketing is Everything, even for an IT department. If the company sees momentum and progress, then they will have a better chance of buying into the philosophy. Announce your success and your program traction - Others will follow the bright light. Next Steps: Tenet #4: Manage from the Business Process Perspective.

8 Always Thinking. AlwaysOn. Established in 1987, Atrion specializes in the fusion of business and technology. Through building relationships with and focusing on our clients business goals, we accelerate business productivity and satisfaction with full-scale customized technology solutions including consultation, project management, manufacturer certified training, carrier services, telephony, software and application services, equipment procurement, local and wide area networks, managed services and digital, interactive and mobile media design. 30 Service Avenue Warwick, RI