Siloed technology and complex processes often restrict IT agile response to opportunities. Learn how to transform your IT with unified endpoint management.
In business, we typically talk about agility in terms of how fast we can respond to opportunities or threats. Business agility, in turn, depends on IT agility: the ability for technology, processes, and personnel to respond to change. Unfortunately, over time many IT departments begin to be entrenched in technology silos and processes that restrict agility. We will outline some steps IT departments can take to focus on reducing complexity to enable and encourage agility.
Twenty-five years ago, most organizations were standardized on a single operating system, and typically a single type of computer. Now, the evolution of IT is nearly continuous with device innovations, refresh cycles, and shifting employee preferences around device types and even ownership. By 2022, it’s expected that the number of networked devices per person in the US will be 13.6, including smartphones, laptops, tablets and other smart devices.
Regardless of the operating system, each device on your network requires monitoring, updating, and specialized software and configurations to support employee productivity and minimize risk. Presented with anything new, IT must juggle manual processes and single-point solutions to respond. As complexity increases, the growing demands of time for device management reduces IT team capacity and efficiency. Over time, this creates what we call the complexity gap, making it difficult or impossible for IT to support business agility.
The Top 4 Challenges Restricting IT Agility
- The need to manage a growing and complex device landscape
- Difficulty tracking assets – where they are located, how they are configured, and what is installed on them
- Staff spend too much time troubleshooting, making it difficult to detect or remediate issues
- Too many management tools to deploy and configure devices and apps
How to Support IT Agility
Long roadmaps, integration dependencies, complex testing algorithms, and manual deployments are holding businesses back. In order to support the business, IT needs to be as simple, flexible, and scalable as possible. The foundation of agility is a unified endpoint management platform that reduces the need for point solutions for individual devices, platforms, or IT asset management capabilities.
“Agility is closely related to simplicity. The simpler the business processes, the agiler the business is. And the simpler the IT systems, the agiler (in general) the IT systems are.” – Pearl Zhu, Future of CIO
To best support IT agility, look for a unified endpoint management solution to reduce technology silos and cover all aspects of the device lifecycle (from deployment to end of life), including:
- The ability to continually roll out improvements (devices, applications, updates) without impacting employee productivity
- The ability to define relationships to improve management and target software distribution (such as location, user group)
- Automating and streamlining common and repetitive workflows
- Enterprise-wide services such as a self-service kiosk to better support decentralized decision making without the risks of Shadow IT and software bloat
- Remote capabilities to manage devices and support productivity
- Real-time visibility and simplified reporting so you can easily track the progress of improvements
By its definition, unified endpoint management helps reduce your technology stack by eliminating siloed solutions. FileWave will also introduce improvements to the processes that can improve IT agility. For example, pushing out a change organization-wide, whether a patch or a new app, can take days or weeks in a complex device landscape. FileWave helps identify and update systems without end-user interaction and with minimal network load. Automations like these are the key to keeping IT agile.
FileWave puts the simple back into your IT practices. To learn more, attend a free demo of our software.
Contact us to find out whether FileWave is a fit for your team. Request your 30-day free trial now.
