“End users now have choices — it’s devices as choice, it’s experience as choice — and that is what has made life both easier and more difficult for IT.” — Ben Ward
The paradigm used to be that corporate technology slowly inched its way into the consumer’s hands. During that era, IT had full control over the technology. Users, however, were frustrated because of its inability to adapt to the experience we expected and needed.
Now, that paradigm has shifted. Ever since the advent of the iPhone, we’ve flipped the script. Now, we’re bringing user-friendly consumer technology into the workplace and asking IT to support it, to secure it — to make it work.
In this episode, Ben Ward, EUC Activist and Senior SE at IGEL, breaks down the history of corporate technology and how consumerization has made IT’s job both easier and more difficult.
We discuss:
- The beginnings of corporate technology
- How the iPhone almost broke IT
- Why enterprises should adopt an intuitive, user-friendly model for support
- The trend toward user experience monitoring
You can read Ben Ward’s brilliant new article: Greater expectations: How the smartphone put employees in charge.
To hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to the Digital Employee Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You’re listening to Digital Employee Experience: A Show for IT Change Makers. Let’s get into the show.
Tom (00:08):
Hello Changemakers. Welcome to the show. I’m Tom McGrath joined as ever by Tim Flower. Tim, tell the people where you’ve been in the last couple of weeks.
Tim (00:18):
I thought that would be coming Tom. I had a great user experience Tom. I was in the saddle of my motorcycle for 5,000 miles and 13 days, and probably 10 or 12 states. I’ve told other folks, I’m just happy to be sitting in a seat right now that’s not moving.
Tom (00:38):
That’s a solo trip is it? Just you and your Harley the whole way?
Tim (00:42):
No, it’s solo for a couple of days, I met a buddy in Nashville. We met up with another buddy in Kansas City. By the time we got out to the Black Hills in Nebraska, there were 14 or 15 of us. It’s a yearly trek out west. It’s a beautiful thing.
Tom (01:01):
Are we talking Hells Angels Tim?
Tim (01:03):
Not quite. What was the other one? There was another movie.
Tom (01:07):
The Outlaws.
Tim (01:09):
Not quite.
Tom (01:10):
That was a motorcycle movie, wasn’t it?
Tim (01:13):
No, we have a blast.
Tom (01:14):
Well, there you go. We are not an IT crowd, but we are an IT chapter. Well we would be perhaps if I had a Harley too, rather than my Fiat Punto. Perhaps our guest can add a bike to the shed. Here’s Ben Ward, new contributor to the DEX Hub. One of our favorite EUC thinkers and activists, as well as an SE @ IGEL. Ben, welcome to the show. Lovely to have you on.
Ben (01:36):
Great guys. Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. I was thinking of Sons of Anarchy Tim. I don’t know if that’s a bit more likely than Hells Angels.
Tom (01:41):
That’s the one.
Tim (01:43):
Yeah. We’re still on the fringes of legal society. We’re not quite that badass.
Tom (01:48):
Do you own a motor bike of some description Ben? Are we in a position to open a chapter of deck show bikers here today?
Ben (01:59):
I’ve got a normal bike, but I’m not very good at it. I don’t think I’ll be joining this chapter, unfortunately, guys, but thanks.
Tim (02:07):
Ben, a great article. I wanted to explore it. It’s up on our DEX Hub. The big kind of summary takeaway for me is that it’s not necessarily a history of IT. It’s a history of user expectations in interacting with IT. It’s more interesting for me because the timeline that you lay out roughly mirrors my IT career. I started in IT in the late ’80s. Your article kind of picks up as a kid in the early ’90s. You highlight two major milestones in IT history. The introduction of the PC and its impact, not only on business, but on consumers and then the introduction of the iPhone and its impact, not only on consumers, but on business and enterprise IT. You look at it from the lens of that consumer and employee consuming technology, but you start out as a young child. We don’t usually explore that technology and kids. Talk a little bit about those early memories and what shaped your view of technology now as an adult based on your interaction as a kid.
Ben (03:17):
Well guys, this might surprise you, but I actually qualify as a Millennial. I think I was born the month of the cutoff that I could actually be officially.
Tom (03:26):
When was that Ben? Because I often call myself a world’s oldest Millennial.
Ben (03:31):
1982, early 1982.
Tom (03:33):
That’s when I was born. Yeah, me too. What month?
Ben (03:36):
February.
Tom (03:40):
February. I’m May. Okay, you are older than me.
Ben (03:42):
There you go. I’ve stolen the crown. I’m the world’s oldest Millennial.
Tom (03:45):
I don’t know. Forget it.
Ben (03:48):
When the internet sort of arrived, then in mid Wales in the UK in about 1996, a lot later than everywhere else, it was completely groundbreaking. But I grew up with all the home computing devices that we got at the time. I had a Spectrum. It was huge in the UK and Europe. I had a Commodore VIC-20. I wasn’t rich enough to get a Commodore 64. I had all these computers and just plugged them in and programming with Sinclair BASIC and Commodore BASIC and all that sort of stuff. That was what I grew up with. I grew up with these computers and these really, really basic games. I’ll tell you, I’ve tried to show them to my kids these days.
Ben (04:21):
They just look at them and say, “We’re not playing that. That’s rubbish.” I sort of understand, when I was growing up all this stuff was really, really cool. Nowadays, it looks really, really old. But we didn’t really get a PC until a lot later. I think it was probably the early ’90s when I was first introduced to this PC. I was in my uncle’s house and they had this amazing big chunk of white plastic and metal and glass. He sort of said to me, “Oh, you can come and play on this.” I was like, “Wow, what is this thing?” They had this printer there as well, I was looking at this printer and I was thinking you can actually print at home. It actually prints on the paper at home.
Ben (04:53):
I thought it was absolutely amazing. I played this game on it and I thought, this is what I need to get. Well, I had no chance to get anything like that because I couldn’t afford it at the time. A PC back in the day would have been many thousands of pounds. It wasn’t something that a normal consumer would go out and just buy. You wouldn’t go to a shop and buy a PC. You have to order it from a catalog or you’d have to order it from a specialist distributor or you’d have to get it given to you by work or get them to pay for part of it. That was early PCs. The reason, I think, was that PCs were business technology. They weren’t there for games.
Ben (05:30):
They weren’t there for entertainment. They weren’t there for anything else apart from word processing, potentially. That was sort of my early exposure. My uncle introduced me to this machine and me having to play with it and thinking, I really, really like this. This is so much better than a Commodore VIC-20 that I’ve got sitting at home. But it was a completely different experience. It just seemed like it was in a completely different league. I don’t think it was until about 1994 that we actually got our first computer. I remember it well, because, again, it was this big plastic and metal and glass thing. It was huge that we just stuck in the corner of the living room. It was a 486. Well, I suppose you’ll all remember what 486 is hopefully.
Ben (06:12):
486DX4-100, which was when it was sold to us, it was almost as fast as a Pentium processor. I thought fantastic. I love this. It had about 4 MB of RAM. It had a 100 MB hard drive and it was running Windows 3.1. I remember thinking this is the most amazing thing ever, like I can click around on the screen with this mouse. Absolutely incredible. From a user perspective, though, and from a usability perspective, it took me a long time to work out how to work this machine, how to understand this machine, how to get the best out of it. Most of the fun that I had was trying to get tools to make this thing work slightly better. I was always trying to tweak it and always trying to optimize it and always getting under the covers to understand how this thing worked. I think that was the way of things.
Ben (06:57):
These machines that came from the world of business and slowly filtered through into consumer life. They weren’t intuitive. They weren’t user friendly. They weren’t consumer devices. That was the key thing about it. These machines that ended up in our lives, they weren’t in any way consumer devices. If you wanted support in one of these things, you have to talk to someone, you need to find a manual, you needed to phone a company to get that support. You couldn’t just go into a shop and get support on these devices. It just didn’t exist at the time. That was sort of my early experience with these PCs and this business technology. I think that’s what we were used to. I think these were the key trends that we had at the time. Business technology slowly filtering into consumer life. I mean, now we look back at it and we think it was kind of strange way of doing things. Why did it work that way? Does that answer your first sort of question?
Tim (07:59):
Yeah, absolutely. You lay out that history of how technology invaded the consumer life. It was a slow build. You saw this awesome technology at work and you’d go home and you’ve got nothing. Maybe you had one of the very early machines, a laptop you could bring home and then you said, “Hey, maybe I need a PC at home as well.” Bill gates famously said, “Everyone’s going to have one and everyone’s scoffed at it.” But it was a slow ride of technology and then kind of really gained steam. I’ll date myself a little bit. I’m not an ’80s child. I go back to the x86, the 286, the 386. The 486 was modern technology, man.
Tom (08:48):
You’ve heard about the enigma.
Ben (08:52):
That’s what it was, it was steam powered. Just talking about his laptop. Tim, that’s a really good point. Those early laptops were definitely not that tops. If you put those in your legs, you’d never be walking again. Those things were huge, but again, they were meant for businesses. They’re meant for people to log around like briefcases and then just stick them on the desk and then open them up. This idea that they were slightly more portable because they have this built-in screen, maybe compared to a big monolithic IBM PC, but they were still not particularly portable, not when you compare it to today’s technology. But again-
Tim (09:21):
Without a doubt.
Ben (09:22):
… for a business perspective, when you have these people locked in these big glass boxes in the middle of a city, they make perfect sense, not for a consumer. But that’s what we were used to. That was the technology that we were used to at the time. I think it was probably only when the internet arrived, probably about, and again, I said sort of 1996, we started to see a change in this because before that you’d have to have the applications pre-installed on your computer. You’d have to get all these floppy disks or even CDs, which were amazing when they turned up. To get applications installed, you’d have to go to a shop to get these applications. When the internet arrived, it just opened up this whole world of being able to do something different, of interacting with the world. I think for a long, long time, this business technology that were sitting in our hallways and sitting in our living rooms, it became our primary way of interacting with the world. But again, these devices at the time weren’t built for that level of interactivity, they weren’t built for the internet.
Ben (10:24):
A lot of them weren’t even built for proper networking. I remember having these devices at home and trying to connect to one into the phone line to try and get some sort of internet service. I mean, even a 33K modem at the time was absolutely amazing. It was groundbreaking. I think that’s what started to change our relationship with these home computers. That sort of started taking them from I’ll use it for work to actually I’m going to use this for entertainment or for collaboration or for talking to someone. I think at that point, our expectations changed slightly. We started to be more productive. We started to reach out to the rest of the world, but that wasn’t the big change. It was just an evolution of having this business technology sitting in the home.
Tim (11:08):
But it’s where the frustration with technology started as well. If you wanted to interact in those early days, if you wanted to interact with the online world, you had to stop interacting with anyone who wanted to call you because you tied up your phone line. It was one or the other. That frustration, I think, has only built over time. The more technology we introduced, the more efficiency we introduce, we also introduced frustration especially on the enterprise side, its inability to adapt to what I need, to the experience that I want and that I expect and that I need. Like you said, it was the only the beginning, what really hit was when the iPhone came out.
Ben (11:51):
Absolutely. Just going back a little bit to those frustrations, I talk a lot about Windows and the history of Windows. If you think about those early days of the PC, when I first got the PC and I upgraded it to Windows 95, even in an enterprise environment, there was no centralized management of Windows. We talk about frustrations that we have maybe working on these devices from home. Working on them in an office environment, it was also very difficult. I think it wasn’t until 1994, the SMS first got introduced by Microsoft to start managing these things in a more centralized way. It wasn’t until 1999 or 2000, we’ve got active directory to have a proper, I say proper, I use that term loosely, centralized management platform for managing all of these devices. If it was difficult in the enterprise to manage these devices, it was even more difficult in a consumer setting.
Ben (12:44):
Brian Madden, the famed EUC analyst, he has this analogy. He said in the early 2000s, most enterprises have got to this place where they sort of understood how to manage Windows, how to manage those PCs. He likened it and Tim, you’ll liken this to somebody riding a motorbike. They’re sort of going around a corner and as they’re going around the corner, they think, “Right, okay, I’m going at this speed. I’m going around this corner. I’ve got this.” But then as we hit sort of later in the 2000s, everything started to go even faster. It got to the point where IT was sort of this person on the motorbike almost losing control of what was going on, because everything was going so fast. IT didn’t know which way to go. What happened in 2007, where the introduction of the iPhone really changed that and made everything go much quicker. There are so many different trends that came from that one pivot point that where we are today, all the good things, can to a large extent be put down to that one innovation in 2007.
Tom (13:44):
You talk about how for most of the early use of the internet at home technology was still fundamentally office technology and that dynamic seemed to be related to Microsoft’s dominance and brand. How did that change with the introduction of the iPhone and we suddenly see Apple taking the lead there?
Ben (14:00):
Well, that’s an interesting one. First of all, I think it’s worth covering how the iPhone was introduced. Back in 2007, 2006, even 2005, there’d been rumors that Apple was going to bring out a phone and everyone was getting really excited and saying what’s this going to look like. Is it going to look like an iPod, but with like a dial on it so we could dial people. There was this famous meme that was doing the rounds at the time. There was so much buzz leading up to Steve Jobs getting up on stage. He knew this and Apple knew this. They’d been working on so many cool things behind the scenes that nobody sort of knew about. Then he got up on the stage and this is a famous video. It’s like one of those seminal moments where you have someone who has real vision getting up on stage and just sort of blowing everyone’s minds.
Ben (14:45):
He got up and said, “Today, we’re going to release three new technologies. We’re going release a touchscreen iPod.” Everyone in the audience sort of cheered and went, “Yeah, brilliant.” We’re going to release a phone and everyone cheered. They’re like, “Yes, this is what we’ve been waiting for.” We’re going to release an internet communication device. He went through this and said, “Touch screen iPod, a phone, an internet communication device.” He went through it again. He saw these three icons on the screen start to combine into this one device, the iPhone. I think that was such a pivotal point in technology. Even today, I don’t think we realize how important that point was. You think about the innovations that came in the iPhone. It wasn’t just a device. I mean, to a certain extent, it wasn’t just that this is a new gadget had been created by this amazing company. This was something that changed so many paradigms that it almost broke IT.
Ben (15:40):
I know, I was around at the time. I was an IT manager at the time. First of all, a new way of interacting with technology, go back to where we were when it came to the PC, sitting in the home, a keyboard and a mouse, they’re not intuitive. They’re really not intuitive. I remember when I was really young trying to use these computers in school, I’d type like this. To a certain extent I do. I used to have a colleague whose job it was back in the early ’90s to train solicitors, so lawyers, how to use computers. She had to spend hours with them, teach them how to use a mouse. These really, really intelligent people, but having to teach them how to use a mouse because it’s not intuitive. Then Steve jobs comes along with the iPhone and says, “Well, you don’t need all that stuff. You can just use the most intuitive stylus that we’ve got built in and then just interact with this technology on this screen.”
Ben (16:33):
Incredible, I mean this stuff had existed before, but it hadn’t been wrapped together with all these other innovations. The fact it was wireless as well where you could just connect into a 3G network or 2G at the time or connect into a wireless network. Probably one of the biggest innovations, the App Store. If you imagine what it’s like to install, I mean, you don’t have to imagine guys, but if you think about what it takes to install an application on Windows, it’s an awful experience. You’ve got to do so many different things. You’ve got an .exe file. You’ve got all the files that go around it. You’ve got to make sure you’ve got the right version of the operating system.
Ben (17:03):
You’ve got to make sure you’ve got enough hard drive space. The system requirements match. How much of that do you have to do with an App Store? None of it. You click on the app, the app installs. That was groundbreaking at the time. Also, we shouldn’t forget about this whole idea of the touch screen iPod, because that is a consumer innovation. The iPod was a consumer innovation. The iPhone took off because of the iPod, because you could have all of your music on one device. It was also a phone. It also had applications. You can also take pictures with it. Those are the innovations. All these pieces came together. If you remember Blackberry back in the day, there was a really key business device, which was the Blackberry. If you think about the difference between a Blackberry and an iPhone, a Blackberry actually had a keyboard bolted onto the front of the thing.
Ben (17:55):
We thought that was amazing at the time when we have this sort of flashing red light whenever we have an email. They’re okay for email, they were rubbish for everything else. Maybe we can make phone calls on them. You then look at the iPhone, which do away with a keyboard, which you could still get emails on and because most of it was screen, you could do so much else on this device. It did just change everything. Back in 2007, this was introduced. 2008, 2009 were incredibly busy times in IT. I mean, it always is, but in so many IT departments across the world because you’d get, I call these, the exec problem. We’d get these execs who’d go to board meetings and they would see other execs, other maybe CEOs on these really cool iDevices. They’d come back to It and say, “Right, I’ve bought one of these devices. I want to get my email on it. I don’t want to use Blackberry anymore.”
Ben (18:48):
You had all these IT people going out to the market and saying, “Look, how do I get email on one of these? How do I secure the email on one of these?” Then we saw this huge growth in these new types of organizations. We have Mobilarm, we have Good, we have AirWatch. We had Citrix buying company called Zenprise. We then had VMware buying AirWatch. We have all these new companies forming to deal with the mobility problem. Then we had sort of a massive consolidation of these companies. But this kicks off a whole new trend because this was the first time that you had on mass, people, consumers, coming into the business and saying, “We’ve already got the tech, you make it work.”
Ben (19:31):
That was the first time we saw this consumerization trend, this was the first time that IT had to say, “Okay, you’re using devices that we haven’t checked. You’re using devices we haven’t mandated. You are having a choice now to be able to choose a device, we’ve got to make it work.” That kicked off so many changes. Consumerization was the big trend. Again, it’s something we have never looked back from, I think. If you go back 20 years, maybe, or 2006 before the iPhone came out, if you wanted to work for an organization, if you were doing any sort of knowledge work, you’d be expected to come into an office, sit at a desk and then use this box you’d have under the table with a screen in front of you and a keyboard, there’d be no conversation about the equipment you’d be using. That was the equipment. You either use it, or you don’t work for the company.
Ben (20:27):
You come forward to today. I mean, I chose a good example of this. They asked me what device I’d like to use. I said, “Well, I’d like to use a Macbook, maybe [inaudible 00:20:36] OS on top of it. I want to use an iPhone. I want to be able to take this stuff wherever I go so I need to find a P-contract.” It’s a completely different expectation. It’s the fact that end users now have got choice. It’s devices as choice. It’s experience as choice. I think that is what has made life both easier and more difficult, conversely, for IT. We’ve seen this huge change. We’re never going to go back. I think if we hadn’t had this change and this might be controversial, if it wasn’t for the release of the iPhone in 2007 and all the changes and the innovations that kicked off, the whole world would have dealt with a pandemic differently.
Ben (21:17):
We wouldn’t have had remote working. We can chalk that up. I know I sound like a little bit of an Apple fan boy here. We can chalk up our success and the fact that the economy globally didn’t dive so much to that innovation, to consumerization and to the fact that we can now work from anywhere.
Tim (21:35):
Without any question at all, Ben, I think about that a lot. Where would we be as a society if we weren’t able to move our businesses and work remotely in an isolated way? It would be a completely different world right now. The timeline that you lay out, we kind of flipped the script. The early frustrations of bringing corporate technology to the home was innovative, but frustrating, dial tone. By the way, our kids don’t even know what dial tone is. Nevermind a busy signal. What’s a busy signal? That frustration of bringing corporate technology to the home had frustration, but we flipped it now. In 2007, we started bringing consumer technology and we put IT on its heels and that frustration moved into IT. How do I support this? How do I secure it?
Tim (22:27):
How do I make it usable? How do I take all the support phone calls at my help desk for devices that we don’t own and applications that we don’t own? All kinds of frustrations there. But to your point, we would not be in the world that we’re in today if that major change hadn’t happened. To kind of move it forward a little bit, that timeline forward in the blog post that you’ve got, you talk about now the tech engagement of your own kids. There’s a couple of really interesting things that you talk about.
Tim (23:00):
One, they’ve never seen a PC that big, chunky, metal, plastic thing. They have no idea what that is, nevermind a laptop. But also the tech issues aren’t as frustrating for them. They run into a problem, they delete the app, they re-install it. They go to YouTube and they take a look at a video on how to use it. It’s intuitive. Not only is it intuitive, but it’s easy and it’s free. What a change from 1990. I’m curious what are your thoughts about that model? Parts of it had been adopted in IT, but how do you see enterprise IT adopting to the intuitive, easy, free kind of model for support?
Ben (23:41):
That’s a really, really good question. There’s this general idea, if you’ve created an interface into something, maybe it’s a user interface or we’ll use Amazon as an example, nobody ever showed anyone how to use Amazon to purchase anything. You just know how to do it. I can imagine what it’d be like if one of my kids was playing a game on their iPad, potentially, other tablets do exist, other vendors do exist, but if they were playing a game on their iPad and they had a problem. I just handed them a phone and said to them, “You can phone this number and speak to someone and they’ll be able to help you.” I’d get such a blank look from them. That’s such an inefficient way of solving a consumer problem.
Ben (24:20):
Very rarely these days. In fact, most companies, if you’ve got any sort of service issue, whether or not it’s with your television, your cable provider, your satellite provider, or something like that, they dissuade you from having any sort of conversation with them. They give you Frequently Asked Questions list. They give you chatbots. Only as an absolute last resort do they ask you to phone them, because they know it’s inefficient. If you’ve got a problem, you want it fixed. If there’s a really easy way to fix that, you do that. Watch a video, go on YouTube. As you said, the kids will just watch the walkthroughs on YouTube. I don’t have to interact with them if they’ve got a problem, which is great for me, but that’s the way that you do it.
Ben (24:58):
This whole idea of having to phone for support, it’s an anachronism, but it’s the same as and I had this conversation with a lot of companies two or three years ago when we were talking about mobility, we’re talking about digital workplaces, this whole idea that a user comes into a certain location. This has become more relevant over the past 18 months. The idea that a user has to come into a certain location to use a PC. The reason that I think that’s such an anachronism, is that the way that people interact with technology these days is no longer that PC in the hallway. It isn’t the PC in the living room. It’s something that’s much easier to use. It’s got a much more human touch and it could be a laptop. Most of the time it’s going to be a phone or a tablet type device that the era of the PC is almost over.
Ben (25:45):
The only place it hasn’t really died is in the enterprise. I think even though consumerization has driven the enterprise a lot, there’s still a way to go. That whole idea around support as well, because computers, because PCs, because Windows, because it’s still a very complex space, even though you try to hide as much of that as possible from the end user, it’s still a complex space. If they’re having problems, a lot of these users, in my experience anyway, won’t get in touch with IT. If they’re having a problem, either they’ll completely ignore it and try and get around it, or they’ll just wait for it to get so frustrating that they then have no other choice than to contact IT. That’s the big problem. You need a way of taking away that complexity. Again, that’s what the consumerization trend does.
Ben (26:32):
This is simple. Nobody has ever shown me how to use one of these devices. The first one I picked up, I knew how to use it. It was simple. It was straightforward. That simplicity is absolutely key, but also understanding how your users are going to be interacting with the technology. I think that’s where sort of the Apple and the other vendors in this world has sort of got that down. They understand how users interact with their technology to pull that telemetry as well, even though we probably don’t know about it. Apple’s constantly pulling back telemetry from each of their devices to understand how people are utilizing it. That same consumer model that enterprises need to have. They’ve been pulling back information from everything they users can interact with to understand how they can proactively solve their challenges, and then go through the cycle and make their interactions more simple and easy.
Ben (27:21):
I have this saying when it comes to end users competing, you might’ve heard it before, but everything we do in end-user computing is to make technology invisible. That’s it. We have to remove technology as a barrier. Those office machines, in which we’re at home, we use them to be productive, but most of the time they were a barrier to productivity. You’re going to notice a big hefty PC, if they notice their device into a certain extent, IT has failed. It should be that user getting straight to their information. Anything they notice in between is just slowing them down.
Tim (27:57):
Yeah. There’s so many things to talk about there. There was one interesting conversation we had with our CEO at my previous employer about this whole paradigm of employees calling the help desk. In this conversation, we said, “We don’t know they have a problem unless they call us.” As those words came out and were said out loud in the room, he stared us in disbelief, we realized that the paradigm had to change. We can’t rely on 30,000 employees to be the IT monitor to tell us that something is broken, that we in IT probably broke. The whole question, even on the consumer side, like you said, if something fails on Amazon or on a web service that you’re using, the first question you ask is why don’t they know this? Why don’t they know I’m having a problem? The paradigm has to work its way into enterprise IT so that employees don’t have barriers. And when they do, IT knows about the barriers and can solve them.
Ben (29:00):
Absolutely. I think IT have actually learned a lot from the mobile vendors, from the new technology vendors, from the consumer led vendors. I mean, I’ll give you an example. Before I joined IGEL, I used to work for VMware. I had a brand new phone, an iPhone XR. I was really excited about getting this new phone because I’m a geek. This phone turned up anyway. I loaded it all up, I activated it. It was absolutely amazing. I loved the thing. I’d broken it within about 30 minutes. I don’t know how I’d broken it. I think the modem have failed in it because it failed activation. I just couldn’t get this thing working again. What I did rather than going to the IT team and saying, “The phone’s broken. You need to send me a replacement.”
Ben (29:41):
I went on the Apple website. I typed in the serial number, told them the problem. They said, “Fine, we’re going to send you out a new one. We’re also going to send you a box to send the old one back.” Within a day, or maybe two days, I had a brand new Apple device. I turned it on. Again, this is the enterprise technology we’re seeing starting to follow. I turned it on and because of the Apple enrollment policies, it was signed back up to the enterprise. All the enterprise applications I’d had from VMware were already back on the device and ready to go. If it wasn’t for the likes of the enrollment processes driven by consumer technology, that wouldn’t have happened.
Ben (30:17):
If that had been a PC, can you imagine me having to go to a shop, buy a new PC and put it on my desk and then saying to work, “Okay, you need to spend that back up.” Especially in the past, it would have been such a difficult proposition that it wouldn’t have happened. They would have to have posted a new one out to me. It would have taken a long, long time to get me back up and running. I think we’re seeing IT and we’re seeing the enterprise vendors starting to emulate a lot of these innovations, a lot of these over the air innovations, which were first introduced to the world from the consumer vendors.
Tom (30:56):
We’ve touched upon it already Ben but this point enter the pandemic, suddenly the workplace itself comes home. What are the implications here? Is it just an intensification of prevailing trends already described or does it introduce a new element?
Ben (31:11):
That’s a really good question, actually. I tend to keep my ear to the ground a lot. I talked to a lot of the vendors and I talked to a lot of customers to try and form my own opinions of what’s happening in the market. I think over the past 18 months from talking to a lot of customers and vendors, I’ve noticed one really big trend. If you think about the way that people are usually working in an office environment, they’re the old way, let’s go to the old world, the old way of working, everybody would be in an office or there’d be around about the office somewhere. If they had a problem, they’d go to IT. They’d probably walk to IT or you’d have floor walkers who’d come around to find out if somebody has got a problem.
Ben (31:50):
In that sort of environment, it can be quite easy to understand if your users are having a problem. Now, if your users are no longer in the office and you no longer actually have eyes on the physical devices and on them, it gets much more difficult. It’s like there’s a wall between IT. Remember during the pandemic, IT wasn’t in the office either. They were all sitting at their kitchen tables. You had all the service desks, you had the support people distributed around the country, or even globally, you have the people actually doing the work, that sounds disingenuous. You have the people using the technology distributed as well. If you think about it, IT was never structured to work in that way. IT was never structured to be able to deal with remote support, because you don’t understand what those users are doing.
Ben (32:38):
The big trend that I’ve seen over the past 18 months, it was a growing trend, anyway, before the pandemic, but that’s really taken off in the past 12 months, is user experience monitoring, understanding how these users are interacting with their technology and this isn’t to make sure they’re working, even though there is a worrying trend around [inaudible 00:32:57] to sort of understand that people are working, is to understand that people are actually being let down or held back by that technology and then tuning their technology and tuning their experience so they can be as productive as possible.
Ben (33:09):
I think that that has really exploded over the past 12 to 18 months or so. One of the really interesting pieces that we saw from the pandemic is that productivity has actually improved. Those people who were working remotely, productivity is improved. That’s because IT has now flipped from a technology conversation to user experience conversation. Technology is still there. It’s still very important, but rather than being technology led, it’s human led. If we can improve that human experience, then we know how to work on the technology. That has been the big paradigm shift in IT over the past. That’s what the pandemic has done for IT. It’s probably created some conversations internally, IT about priorities, but that is the real priority that we’re looking at the moment.
Tim (33:57):
Even small things, the little nuances, like words matter, for decades, talked about them in terms of users and even the word user is in the context of IT. You are a user of technology that I give you. It’s now about employee experience, the experience of you as an employee doing your job versus you as a user of technology that’s been provisioned to you. It’s a small nuance, but it’s changing the conversation.
Ben (34:23):
Tim, you’re absolutely right. In fact, I put a poll on LinkedIn probably about three months ago, asking what we should be calling the people in our organization now, should we call them users? Should we call them employees? Should we call them humans? Should we call them people? In the end, I think, it was users who one simply because most of my respondents were techy people, but really, really good suggestion was to call them colleagues because that’s the great leveler when it comes to an organization. Everyone is a colleague, whether or not they’re CEO or they’re cleaning the halls, they are colleagues. That sort of makes everybody equal. I really liked that, Tim. All humans, but that makes you sound a little bit strange.
Tim (35:02):
At the Hartford, we use teammates.
Ben (35:05):
Teammates, I like that.
Tim (35:07):
It creates the connectivity that we’re all in this together. We’re all here to do our job. But colleagues works too. We’ve seen that more and more customers that I work with that it’s less and less about user and more about the collaboration of colleagues and teammates.
Ben (35:21):
Well, this is because I used to be an IT manager, I did suggest Agents of Chaos, but that didn’t go down too well. I think we’ll stick with colleagues.
Tom (35:32):
That described me a little Ben. But listen, pleasure to have you on the show. Definitely want to have you back on the show as well, if that’s okay, but for now, please tell our listeners or users of the show where they can find and follow you.
Ben (35:49):
Yeah. Well, I’m on LinkedIn. Just have a look for Ben Ward. I’m @BenWardUK on Twitter. Feel free to reach out.
Tom (35:59):
Superb Ben. Of course, they can go to the DEX Hub, right now. Find it in the show notes and read your fantastic new article right away.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
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