Efecte Blog

It was a dark and stormy morning… itSMF 2011 in Dipoli was about to begin. The topic of this year’s conference was delicious. It was evident that also the guest speakers had been inspired by the Holy Cow –theme. There were entertaining sessions about the psyche and traits of successful CIOs, heated debate about ITIL’s contribution to IT, and breath-taking views of the future. The most exciting part of the program were the real-life stories from different IT organizations: Tieto-Tapiola, Wärtsilä, Sanoma-Data, and Enfo to name a few. One IT leader was heard exclaiming, how refreshing it was to come out of one’s own cave to hear from others in similar situations, and find out they were not alone with their challenges.

Riitta Raesmaa and Timo Hyvönen

Efecte’s own stand was busier than perhaps ever. And we didn’t even offer champagne this time! It must have been the large screen TV with ICT WebShop ’s colorful icons and the charm of our people at the stand. More seriously though, it seems that IT is truly interested in making the end users happy and allowing them to take control in the form of self-service. It’s a win-win situation for both sides.

Efecte’s Sampo Pasanen had an opportunity to hold a workshop on end user IT service catalogs and self-service to a room packed to the rafters with IT professionals. What set this workshop apart was the lively discussion, which had nothing to do with technology. The questions posed during the discussion inspired Sampo to write a blog series with the answers. The first blog post in the series will be published next week, so remember to check our blog then again.

It was heartwarming to hear Efecte referenced in so many places. We, of course, had our own session, but we were also mentioned by the ITSM guru Aale Roos, by the very successful Tieto-Tapiola in their case presentations, and as a cherry on top ex-Efectian Riitta Raesmaa received the itSMF 2011 award. This year you couldn’t get away from Efecte, even if you tried.

To finish an already great conference, Alf Rehn blew us away with his Dangerous Ideas. At least all the cob webs around my brain and thinking were blown away for sure – if just for too short a moment.

When we started building our latest product, the ICT WebShop, we dug deep into to the world of self-service. What a mind job! When interviewing people outside IT (IT’s customers) we heard eye-opening rants about IT that demonstrated how utterly IT has forgotten the users.

IT was seen as a black hole.  Employees didn’t know what is available, how and when. Some employees spent whole days figuring out how to order an access right to an application, and some had waited 3 months for IT to provide a server for an important project.

This incapability to serve the user has created the Shadow IT: IT activities that are handled completely outside the IT function.

Shadow IT isn’t all bad..

Examples from real organizations:

• Employees use their own workstations and phones (this happens also in the Finnish Parliament)
• R&D teams ordered their mailing lists, servers, hubs and other IT resources from their own partners, instead of IT, because it was easier and faster.
• Cloud services are acquired without any communication with IT
• One business manager had even ordered the whole networking to a new factory because IT wasn’t able to deliver.

In an extreme case the official IT was replaced by an operations team that took IT responsibilities due to their better capability to manage the needs of the customer and deliver IT solutions.

Now Shadow IT isn’t all bad. In best cases it enables business units to pilot new services, achieve their goals faster, and develop their own operations. But there are couple things to be noted:

1. IT should know about all IT activities
2. Support responsibilities should be clarified, as end users will easily contact Service Desk, that will be unaware of the service if it hasn’t been introduced to IT at all
3. End users should have an easy access to IT services, whether they are provided by IT or someone else

If this is not achieved, IT is left in the shadows. In the long run this creates an IT crisis caused by too many overlapping applications, unclear responsibilities and highly unsatisfied users.

There should also be sign posts in software to tell users where they are.

The other day I was discussing with a friend of mine who complained that her car navigation system had taken her 100 km detour to a location that was just 50 km away. More than an hour of extra time spent on a journey that should have taken only half an hour.

This made me think that I have taken numerous similar kinds of detours in the depths of different software and sometimes have been so lost that the only way out has been to go back home. This provided that the option to go home has been available. Other options have been to close browser tab or software altogether – similar to abandoning your car next to an emergency phone and calling for a taxi home.

If you compare for example Microsoft CRM to Google’s search page, you probably know what I’m talking about. Of course Microsoft CRM system is way more complex piece of software than Google search, but it’s the ideology that differs.

When following the usage of different software, it is clear that the users take 100 km detours all the time. Some software may even seem like a maze that the users cannot find out.

This should not be the case: we should demand the same kind of simple navigation help from the software as we demand from car navigation systems. User of a software typically has quite clear understanding were she wants to be, but only a vague idea how to get there. Software should state loud and clear: “From the next exit take a right turn and in 50 meters you have reached your goal”.

This is especially important for software that is used rarely. With ICT WebShop we created a software navigation that guides the end-user to the right direction. As Riitta Kohvakka from Tieto-Tapiola puts it:

 The look of the product and its browser-based interface are up-to-the-minute. It is a modern tool that guides end users through the operation they wish to complete.

As there are no junctions that have hundred different roads leading to it, in ideal world there should not be software screens that have hundred different options to choose from. As there are street names in the navigation systems and a red dot showing where you are, there should also be sign posts in software to tell users where they are.

Just as navigation systems are nowadays more and more frequently built into cars, so do software need to have built-in navigation systems that tell users where they are and where to turn next to reach the goal they are aiming for.

Stinkies from the Moomin board game.

I watched my kid play Moomin board game the other day. He had removed all the Stinkies from the game that could potentially lower his score in the end, and got huge points in the game. Ingenious.

He was (unknowingly, I have to admit) following Finland’s State IT Director and CIO Yrjö Benson’s guideline for IT projects: “The best eGovernment initiatives are not the ones where the traditional services are put online, but the ones where the services are made completely obsolete or significantly simpler”. He referred to the tax return form filing process that was made completely obsolete for most citizens. They tweaked the whole game.

So how does this apply to your organization?

I was recently involved in a customer project for providing ICT services online for internal users. The project was a huge success because:

1. Customer had the courage to greatly reduce the amount of software, types of workstations, types of printers, types of accessories available etc, which simplified the ordering for end users and request handling for ICT personnel.
2. They eliminated unnecessary steps in the process by completely bypassing first line support for service requests that can’t be handled there anyway. They reduced options in printing services because it became cheaper to provide the better alternative as a standard. Now they a) don’t spend time on the phone explaining the customer all the options and what it means, b) number of mistakes in the orders dropped and c) there are fewer configurations to maintain.
3.  They got rid of many unnecessary forms and drastically simplified the rest

The result? End users love it. Delivery is faster. Costs are lower.

Get rid of Stinkies in your organization. Tweak the game for your end users.