Companies are finding that the traditional approach of a four-year, one-size-fits-all technology refresh cycle no longer works for today’s tech-charged workforce. For some employees, that cycle is too long and limits their ability to be productive by keeping them from the latest hardware and applications that they’re accustomed to in their personal lives. Other workers are less demanding, and a refresh may arrive years too early for them, resulting in unnecessary system downtime and wasteful spending.
In theory, surveying employees about what technology they use and need to be most productive would result in harmonious unions between people and technologies. However, this ideal scenario breaks down pretty quickly when you consider the time it would take to process that feedback at the enterprise level. And, even if you could, does the user really know best? The average user isn’t going to be able to name every application they’ve interacted with, provide an unbiased portrayal of their system performance, or be willing to disclose their use of Shadow IT. Not to mention that people change job roles and leave companies frequently, which immediately nullifies the project of matching resources to those individuals.
Thankfully, there is a better approach that will allow you to make purchasing and provisioning decisions based on facts rather than user perception. While the basic concept behind this approach may sound familiar to you, the addition of collection and analysis of real user data makes all the difference between a time-intensive effort with minimal returns and an ongoing way of tailoring end-user experience improvements to employee workstyles.
A Personalized Approach to IT
Continuous user segmentation, also known as personas, is a way of grouping users based on their job roles, patterns, behaviors, and technology. Personas provide a meaningful lens for IT to understand what different types of users need to be productive, allowing IT to optimize assets accordingly.
Workspace analytics software for IT automates the segmentation process and continues to assess user characteristics and experiences to update groupings based on quantitative metrics. As a result, once persona groupings are defined, IT can focus on addressing the needs of different groups and let the software do the work of updating the populations within each persona. This functionality is key to any Digital Experience Monitoring strategy.
It Pays to Segment Users Right
Overlooking personas can lead to over- or under-provisioning assets to a job role. This can be costly to a company in several ways. Over-provisioning licenses can be wasteful of a company’s money while under-provisioning can become a nightmare for IT administrators. Under-provisioning encourages users to install their own applications and allows their user profiles to be personally optimized. However, all the miscellaneous applications can burden IT administrators with the multitude of unique problems for each user and application. Applications that users installed might also not be compatible with each other. Additionally, users may use applications not compatible within the workspace, disabling the ease of sharing files.
Optimizing assets for a company with the aid of personas can enable an increase in productivity. With the use of personas, job roles can be catered to uniquely, but with the provisioning remaining consistent. Each job role, based on real user data, can be provisioned unique licenses and applications that cater to their needs. This prevents users from feeling the need to install their own versions of missing applications, ultimately allowing IT administrators to limit any potential application or license errors.
Segmenting Users in Practice
Using common persona categories, a company may have deskbound users who are provisioned with expensive laptops when a desktop would do, or they may have knowledge workers with expensive i7 CPUs when a PC with an i5 or i3 makes more sense. We have also had customers report that they found that their power users needed to be refreshed every year because of the productivity improvement, while their task workers didn’t need a refresh for as long as five years.
Using personas to segment the end-user environment for a targeted refresh allows an enterprise to provide the right end-user device for a given end user based on their CPU consumption, critical application usage, network usage, and other key metrics. The benefits are numerous and include reduced cost, higher end-user productivity, better security, and a device custom-fit to the end user’s needs.
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