CIO’s Find Focus on Digital Transformation During Crisis
CIO’s are looking at IT processes more closely during this current economic contraction. The Wall Street Journal[1] cites CIO’s who say “digital transformation is a must” in these times, and that it is critical that “technology is leveraged to enable employees and clients with insights” to drive workflows.
In other words, inefficient processes requiring unnecessary or redundant face-to-face interactions where cost-effective technology can be utilized is no longer buried in the scramble of high production. The skeletons are coming out of the closet.
Waste in IT Support of a Mobile Workforce
Companies with vast mobile infrastructures supporting front line mobile workers, such as in distribution, healthcare, and logistics are finding that the amount of human touches are too many with too little actionable information in each exchange.
Below are three areas of waste that can be eliminated:
- Mobile workers are not using their mobile computers to report issues to IT in a way that provides IT with actionable data.
- Problem discovery by IT support often requires on-site visits to recreate or capture the issues. Mobile hardware is often replaced or sent for repair as a first, wasteful step.
- Diagnosis of systemic mobile infrastructure issues is often done by committee involving competing interests (“it’s not my fault”) and requiring many hours of unproductive communication.
Empower People with Actionable Data Analysis
Technology-focused data visibility and analysis services empower the CIO’s, IT support, and the front-line workforce. The ability to communicate critical information quickly without waste and redundant human interactions means better outcomes and safer people.
Two complementary technologies and related services that CIO’s may consider to focus existing teams and eliminate gross inefficiencies in IT support processes are:
- Remote and unbiased monitoring that captures mobile worker feedback with failure data, analyzes the impacts and isolates the mobile infrastructure bottleneck in minutes. Mobile Systems Intelligence by Connect Inc. utilizes a number of automation techniques to streamline IT support of mobile a workforce.
- A mobile device management (MDM) solution that allows for remote monitoring of the mobile device hardware and software, such as battery life, and automates the analysis into actionable resources for IT.
Both of these solutions are high impact to the business relative to their cost and effort to implement and have measurable financial benefits in addition to making the lives of those out in the field and office or home office safer and skeleton-free
[1] “CIO’s Batten Down the Hatches” Tom Loftus. CIO Journal by Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2020.
