Transforming IT for a New Era of Business: Delivering a Better Experience for Users

For today’s IT professionals, the only constant is the need to keep changing—to rise to new challenges and seek out new and better ways to support the business. Last year, a prime focus for this culture of innovation—and a recurring theme in this newsletter—was improving efficiency and reducing costs to help organizations weather the economic downturn. Now, as the economy shows signs of improvement, IT will play a vital role in improving productivity and enabling new strategies for growth throughout the organization.

Part one: Delivering a better experience for users
Amid a constant stream of buzzwords and next big things, it can be easy to lose sight of IT’s core mission with respect to users: helping employees make effective use of technology to do their work. In an ideal world, IT would always provide each user with the best possible experience—convenient, reliable and tailored to each worker’s needs and preferences. In reality, IT’s own needs and limitations must also be taken into account: employees are provided with computers—but only company-standard machines and configurations. Business and industrial applications offer powerful functionality, but their usage is limited by non-scalable models for implementation, maintenance and support. Remote access tools promise greater flexibility for employees—but only those whose network connection can keep up.

Traditionally, tradeoffs like these have been accepted as an inevitable and worthwhile price to pay for innovation. But user experience isn’t just a matter of comfort and convenience; hard-to-use tools, unreliable performance and unresponsive IT practices degrade individual and group productivity, impairing time-to-market and competitiveness. As a new set of business challenges places a premium on employees’ creativity and performance, it’s imperative for IT to refocus on real user needs and delivering the best possible user experience.

Use desktop virtualization to eliminate “bad computer days”
One of the most common frustrations for users is having their work interrupted by technical difficulties. Unable to resolve the problem themselves, they must report it to IT and hope that help isn’t too long in coming.

Already at the top of many enterprise IT agendas for the coming year, single-image desktop virtualization with Citrix desktop virtualization solutions can eliminate a broad range of common technical problems. Rather than managing hundreds or thousands of instances of each application and operating system throughout the enterprise, IT maintains a single master image of each in the datacenter. Users are no longer interrupted by local software conflicts, corrupt applications and other endpoint-specific problems, and many of the narrower range of problems that may still arise can be addressed through self-service tools that both speed time to resolution and prevent the feeling of helplessness that can damage morale.

Enable hardware independence
The nine-to-five, office-bound worker is quickly becoming a thing of the past; today’s employees work in more places, at more times of day than ever—at least, that’s the expectation. Unless they have similarly flexible access to their applications and data, the promise of anytime, anywhere productivity remains unfulfilled. Laptops are heavy and prone to loss or theft; at any given moment, a hardware failure can make it impossible to work in any location.

Desktop virtualization frees users from reliance on a single PC and makes it possible to access the same complete desktop environment, including data, applications, configurations and personalizations, through any device. Able to become instantly productive no matter where they are, users gain not only productivity, but also a greater sense of control over their work life and a reduction in anxiety.

The abstraction of desktops from the underlying hardware also paves the way for a bring-your-own-computer program in which employees receive a subsidy to provide and maintain a PC of their own. As the consumerization of IT has demonstrated, many or most of today’s workers are sophisticated enough to have their own individual style and preferences when it comes to technology; many already have better computers at home than they use at work. Allowing them to spend the day with their own device, rather than a generic, IT-issued corporate computer, gives them a large measure of control over their own user experience.

Provide a truly high definition experience
While desktop virtualization offers clear and numerous benefits for user experience, a poorly designed implementation can backfire if the virtual desktop fails to measure up to a real desktop. Limited capabilities can make even a state-of-the-art laptop feel like a dumb terminal. Virtualized desktops that depend on an optimal network environment leave mobile and remote workers with less-than-ideal connectivity to suffer through endless latency. To deliver a truly high definition experience, IT must ensure that they address the full spectrum of user requirements, from crisp responsiveness to plug-and-play support for peripherals.

Citrix has taken a holistic approach to this challenge with Citrix HDX, a broad set of technologies designed to enable a high definition user experience for virtual desktops and applications. Incorporated into Citrix virtualization products such as Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp, HDX helps optimize every element of the supporting architecture, from the datacenter to the device, and adapts to changes in the environment by applying the best technologies for each unique user scenario, whether the desktop is accessed locally on the corporate network or from outside the corporate firewall for remote desktop access.

Deliver applications on-demand
The rise of smartphones has helped to engender a culture of instant gratification for users: there’s an app for that—and you can install it in moments to start using it right away. Within the enterprise, delayed gratification has been the norm, as users must request non-standard applications, then wait for them to be installed. In a virtualized environment, IT can offer immediate, self-service access to virtually any application. Citrix XenApp makes it possible to deliver even complex, multi-tier line-of-business applications and 3D graphics packages quickly and easily to let users start using new applications instantly from any location. Faster time-to-value aids both productivity and user satisfaction.

Use social media to bond the distributed enterprise
While the distributed enterprise has enhanced flexibility for businesses and users alike, it can also erode workplace community and leave users feeling isolated. Remote workers find it hard to get a sense of what others are working on and the context of their own work. Lacking opportunities for impromptu touch-bases and brainstorming, they find that important decisions have been made without their input, leaving them disengaged and de-motivated.

Already gaining ground in many enterprises, social media tools such as blogs, wikis, Twitter and social networking platforms can help restore and foster interpersonal connections over distance. In an immediate sense, this type of unstructured communication aids collaboration, information-sharing and teamwork. On a deeper level, it helps people work together more effectively by strengthening personal relationships and corporate culture. The rapid rise of consumer social media proves that it addresses a real human need; by leveraging these tools in the workplace, IT can improve morale while meeting business needs at the same time.

Humanize technology
Many Citrix customers have already made it a priority to simplify computing for their users. Unlike in past decades, when people interacted with technology primarily at work—and expected it to be somewhat intimidating—today’s users have been spoiled by increasingly advanced consumer technology which still manages to be approachable and user-friendly. Applications that seem more complex than they should be now breed resistance and resentment—and rightly so. To ease adoption while reducing training costs, IT should explore measures like creating a simplified front-end to applications for users who need only a portion of their functionality. User experience should be a top-level criterion for new applications, and both hardware and software should be chosen with ergonomics in mind. After years of focusing on raw power, IT must now place equal importance on providing tools that are simpler to use, providing intuitive solutions to real user needs.

In our next issue, we’ll continue our series on “Transforming IT for a new era of business” with an exploration of IT consumerization. In the meantime, you can find additional information on the strategies and technologies discussed above on the Citrix web site, including:

Citrix desktop virtualization solutions
Citrix HDX technology
Citrix XenApp
Humanizing technology and social media in the enterprise