INCREASING THE FOCUS ON END USER COMPUTING CAN IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY
The items of IT equipment and software that are provided to end users are often regarded as commodity items but they are actually critically important to your IT strategy.
Both are a major IT expense items, but more importantly, both can have a significant effect on your staff’s productivity and satisfaction with IT.
For this reason, it is important that businesses have an End User Computing strategy that defines things like:
- Equipment and configuration standards
- What software applications should be used
- How users access the company’s IT systems and data
- Endpoint security standards
- End User Computing Policies
Getting all this right will have a very positive effect on the end user’s experience and overall productivity.
Developments like ‘Cloud Computing’, ‘Data Analytics’, ‘The internet of Things’ and ‘Hyper Converged Infrastructure’ are hot topics in IT today and rightly receive a great deal of focus and attention. But they are only as important as their ability to increase business productivity and reduce costs and risks. However, it is an area that often receives little attention in IT planning and budgeting.
Your end users’ experience is affected by many factors, including the usability of their workstation, IT policies, security and data protection provisions, network access controls, how workstations are administered and supported, etc. Incremental improvements in these areas can often be achieved at low cost but they can deliver significant benefits to your staff and the business overall.
KadecIT consultants are experienced in all the areas of IT that are necessary for creating a computing ‘environment’ that will enable your users to perform at maximum efficiency and productivity. We can assist you to develop and implement an End User Computing plan that will help your organisation maximise the productivity of staff while also reducing your costs and risks.
We can also help you to create a plan for the ongoing development of your end-user computing environment, and we have the skills and experience to help you effectively implement and support the plan.
Specifically, our team can assist you with all of the following:
- Reviewing the existing end-user systems and related facilities to establish where issues exist and where improvements can be made and costs reduced.
- Defining and implementing policies and standards for the setup and use of end-users systems to provide functional consistency for staff and reduce support incidents and costs.
- Ongoing maintenance and support for these systems to keep them in fully operational, up-to-date and secure condition.
- PLANNING TO IMPROVE END USER PRODUCTIVITY
- USER POLICIES & STANDARDS
- KEY CRITERIA FOR INCREASING THE ROI ON DEVICES
Increasing staff productivity is a primary goal of IT. Improving the computing experience of staff is one way to achieve this and it starts with planning.
The plan should address all the factors that affect the end users’ experience, including:
- The usability, performance and reliability of their workstation (PC, laptop or tablet)
- The organization’s policies with respect to End User Computing
- The security provisions that have been implemented for users’ workstations
- How software updates and upgrades are managed and installed
- The availability and usability of the network services that have been provided, such as printers, scanners, etc
- Where users’ data is stored and how is it backed up
- The remote access capabilities that have been set up for users and their devices to access the company network and data
Kadec can assist you to create and implement an effective End User Computing Plan that will improve your users’ productivity and satisfaction with IT.
Lack of policies and standards around the use of IT can be detrimental to your organisation.
Basic policies and standards would cover issues like:
- Where data can be stored
- What applications can be run
- Acceptable Internet use
- Acceptable Email use
- Use of removable storage media and external services (like DropBox)
If your business does not have policies like these in place it can be exposed to serious risks, including data theft or loss, loss of business reputation, breach of licensing agreements, and more.
Kadec can help you formulate a basic set of IT policies and standards to cover the most important aspects of IT and its use in your organisation.
When purchasing PCs, laptops and tablets business managers are presented with a bewildering array of models and prices. So how do you choose the most suitable devices for your users and your business?
Here are some recommendations for your consideration:
- Buy more CPU power and memory than you need. This will increase the useful life of the device. Increasing the useful life from 4yrs to 5yrs will reduce the TCO of that device by about 20%
- Purchase high quality equipment. The extra support costs, downtime, lost productivity and user frustration of low quality devices, over the life of the devices, will far outweigh any extra cost associated with purchasing high quality equipment
- Buy on-site warranty.
Businesses need on-site warranty because sending computers away for repairs or service is vastly more costly to a business than having a field service engineer come and fix it on site. Your business will be far better served by purchasing equipment from vendors that provide on-site warranty. This is why KadecIT recommends HP and Dell - Larger screen size significantly improves user productivity. For desktop users consider 2 displays. Note: This is a big issue for laptops and tablets – small might be convenient but bigger will be more productive
Over 4 years, which is the nominal life of a PC or laptop, the average IT user will cost a business about $300k to $500k in salary and associated costs (and the user needs to return about double that in productive work to the organisation). The tool you provide the user to do this productive work, their PC or laptop, will typically cost less than ½ of 1% of this! So spending a bit more for quality and performance and on- site warranty to ensure users are as productive as possible makes solid business sense.
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