Depending on which age group you fall into, your end user experience at your workplace will have undergone several transformations. From pen and paper to typewriters and then to desktop computers to give just a few examples.
If you look back over just these things to begin with, you quickly realise that end user computing digital transformation has always been necessary for companies to survive. How many typewriter using companies survived the computer revolution?
Today of course the landscape is even more complex. No longer are people bound to desktop computers and single places of work. People these days all have mobile phones, tablets and laptops, and it’s common for people to own and use multiple devices. This mobility element gives workers and organisations a huge advantage of being able to let them work wherever their jobs take them, enabling them to engage directly with customers for example.
There is also a proliferation of devices and device ecosystems. Go back 20 years and pretty much everyone had windows. Now that landscape contains MacBooks, iOS, Android and Google chromebooks etc.
But why do companies these days need to consume all these? There are a couple of reasons. The first is to do with the ecosystem of their apps they need to use for their business, and the second is device choice. Organisations are realising that it’s no longer desirable to give people any old device. You look at all the top companies now and they all offer choice. This is proven to improve productivity and user satisfaction.
This leads me on nicely to the users themselves. You may have read that this year, 50% of the workforce are now millennials. So what I hear you ask. These are a group of people who have grown up in the most recent era of IT. They are the ‘app store’ generation and are used to being able to choose their preferred devices and deploy their own apps when it suits them.
As a result this has had a big impact on their perception of corporate IT when they start working, and is proven to impact staff retention. Give these people a poor IT experience and they may look elsewhere. This has meant HR are a lot more interested in IT than before as they realise it’s essential to provide a good service to retain staff. As companies strive for competitive advantages, the last thing they want is to lose staff to competitors because they offer a superior IT experience.
So, in my view, end user compute digital transformation isn’t a thing we can do and forget about. It’s a constantly evolving thing we must continue to develop. As technology continues to evolve, organisations must consider how they continue this transformation story. What the next phase of digital transformation is, only time will tell….
VirtuallyUnboxed 