Customizing IT User Experience: To Enable Workstyles in Our Digital Workplace

Corey is a hyper-mobile, customer-facing sales representative who is not technically inclined. Sean is an office-based, highly technical engineer. And Jessica is a collaborative and non-technical business professional with a flexible workstyle, working in the office, at home or on the road when it makes sense.

They are just some of the different people with different workstyles that today’s IT organizations need to accommodate as they strive to address a huge shift in what users want for tools and services to be productive both in and out of the office in today’s workplace.

After conducting more than two years of persona and workstyle research, Dell IT recently took a groundbreaking first step in tailoring our tools and services to match our distinctive user groups. We unveiled the Sales Jetpack—a combination of devices, tools, services and education resources specifically focused on our customer-facing, mobile sales staff around the globe.

The idea is to give our field sales professionals— represented by our defined persona Corey, mentioned above—an IT kit of sorts that will enable them to be as effective as possible in doing their specific job. The Jetpack bundle starts with a new Dell laptop, which our sales staff gets annually anyway. In this case, the laptop is a cutting-edge, two-in-one, touch screen model that allows sales folks to take notes on the screen as they interact with clients.

Beyond that, the package includes new cloud-enabled, productivity management software that provides email, social networking services, and collaboration capabilities, as well as a headset that will ensure the best conferencing experience while connecting remotely.

For the first time, we are actually presenting a distinctive set of users with what they should use and how they should use it to be the most productive and effective in their job.

The Sales Jetpack is only the beginning of what we envision as many more initiatives to customize our IT services to the needs of the people that use them, however. In fact, we have currently singled out six different personas— representations or composites of a significant group of people within our enterprise—and three basic workstyles to serve as major drivers of our newly defined digital workplace experience.

More than character sketches

The impetus behind our more personalized approach to IT User Experience is more than just an exercise in providing interesting backstories to fictitious composites of our various IT clients.  The fact is that the corporate world is changing and we need to move from the outdated 9-to-5 office of 20 years ago to a more contemporary workplace that fits the needs of today’s many types of employees who want flexibility in where, when and how they work.

We need to create a digital workplace that will meet the expectations of a workforce that expects our technology to keep pace with what they use in their daily lives outside of work.

To do this, we’ve defined our digital workplace effort around three key workstyles: those who work in the office in the more traditional workplace mode, those who work from home via remote capabilities, and those who work on the road using mobile technology.

Effectively, we are striving to allow our team members to work from wherever they feel most productive in a way that balancing their work and life styles.

Dell IT is still in the process of upgrading the capabilities to provide seamless WiFi and contemporary meeting space in the office; seamless access and rich conferencing abilities from home; and increased mobile apps, seamless access and one-click meeting capabilities on the road.

How we got started

Establishing key personas is helping us take IT User Experience to a whole new level by providing a unique framework to help us tailor those upgraded IT tools and services to specific user groups.

Our persona research actually started as a way to meet the needs of team members from acquisition companies as part of the integration process. A few years ago, we had acquired a number of start-up companies at which workers were accustom to more flexible digital workplace capabilities.

Our User Experience team actually went to some of these companies and interviewed team members about their needs, previous experiences and how we could enable them. From that we put together our first persona, Sean Ryan, a contemporary developer. The persona proved to be very useful in guiding our IT strategy, so we put together more personas for different user groups based on different types of user research – interviews, surveys, direct feedback, and observation.

We have found that personas are invaluable design tools. They let IT make informed decisions about how people that we haven’t met will interact with our services. With personas, we can better understand where we have gaps in our portfolio for specific groups of people.

We singled out six personas as key drivers for our current digital workplace effort and we plan to put together similar targeted packages of tools and services for those groups in addition to our newly-launched field sales initiative.  The remaining five are remote support, engineering, business professional, pre-sales and field support.

As we make improvements to our IT services, we are constantly getting feedback from users to make sure our efforts are on track. Every quarter we measure user satisfaction via a survey that goes out to 10,000 of our 140,000 team members and also use other broader feedback surveys to determine where our services need improvement. Our satisfaction scores are broken out by persona and region to target what issues need to be addressed.

All of these tools are helping us stay ahead of fast-changing working patterns, technology and shifting expectations in a workforce where it is increasingly clear that when it comes to IT tools and services, one size doesn’t fit all.

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Self-Service Eases PC Deployment

Do any of you remember when self-service was reserved for all-you-can-eat buffets? Some of you aren’t old enough to remember when there was no such thing as a self-service gas station. Every gas station used to be entirely full-service, which meant a nice person would come to your car and ask you which grade of gas you wanted and you wouldn’t have to lift a finger.  While the pump was going, they would clean your windows and you drove away with a full tank and truly perfect windows.

In the 1980s, self-service really took hold when people started paying for everything under the sun with credit cards and when credit card processing got so good that you could build it right into the pump it became the norm. Since then, self-service seems to be everywhere and rightly so because it allows buyers to make quick decisions at point-of-sale, and reduces time spent on menial tasks freeing up resources for more strategic efforts.

These great self-service characteristics can even be applied by IT organizations today. For example, Dell IT is now leveraging a newly-launched capability called Shared Connected Configuration to bring the efficiency of self-service to enterprise PC deployments. This new service allows Dell PC customers to connect directly to Dell factories to manage their own custom Windows image—including applications and configuration—and ultimately have their PCs shipped to end users ready for first time login.

Dell IT technicians, who service some 140,000 employees around the world, are putting Connected Configuration to the test and driving efficiencies in our own PC deployment practice.

Taking PC deployment to the next level

In the world of hardware infrastructure, self-service has always meant online support portals where you can search the knowledge base, submit a ticket or post to a community forum.  Connected Configuration, part of Dell’s ProDeploy for PCs, goes beyond the simple online portal by allowing customers to upload PC images, pick their configuration options and keep those selections up-to-date using existing tools.

With Connected Configuration customers connect their Microsoft System Center Configuration Management (SCCM) environment to Dell’s supply chain. That means customers can use the SCCM toolset for image creation to customize and maintain their organization’s Windows image and burn that image on new device orders as part of the factory process. When they order PCs, they can ensure the latest image is installed on the systems in the Dell factory and that they are ready for first time login.

In the past, customers worked with their services program manager to update their PC configurations, shipping the image to Dell’s Customer Factory Integration (CFI) team via a thumb drive or a hard drive. Dell Services would then make sure all of the systems ordered had the specified images.

Besides being able to maintain their PC images themselves, the new self-service option offers another big advantage for users. Before Connected Configuration, an IT technician at the organization receiving the PC would have to perform the second-touch action of adding the new system to that organization’s Active Directory domain before delivering the PC to the user for first login. With Connected Configuration, that step is performed at the factory before the system is shipped.

Using our own technology

Based on our current pilot, Dell IT is very excited about the value that Connected Configuration can deliver to our organization by eliminating the need for our IT techs to prepare new PCs for login across the company. This new self-service capability will also expedite employee PC orders because it will allow Dell to ship the systems directly to the end users.

In fact, pilot results indicate that the self-service process could cut shipping time for a newly ordered PC in half, from 6 to 10 days to 3 to 5 days and totally eliminate the need for IT to do 10 to 15 minutes of onsite preparation per system.

Considering that Dell IT is on track to refresh some 29,000 systems a year for both legacy companies in the U.S. and EMEA, the potential value of this self-service innovation is significant.

Some lessons learned

Enterprise integration with the Dell factory requires anticipating and addressing networking, firewall and other technical challenges, but the rewards can be considerable. Be proactive and consider the following lessons we learned.

1. There’s a huge opportunity to enhance the way PCs are distributed. If you are doing it the old way, there’s definitely a better way to do it.

2. Engage your security teams early and have them be a part of the process in this security-centric integration. You’ve got to have those guys on board and they’ve got to be part of the conversation.

3. This capability has the potential to free up substantial IT resources that can be used to address other value-added IT challenges.

We think this solution is great now and its capabilities are only going to get better for both end users and for IT.

Check out Jim Roth, SVP, Services IT, Dell, at Dell EMC World 2017 in the Services Booth to discuss how Dell IT is consuming services for predictive and proactive support.

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