Transforming IT Operations for Automation and AI Starts With the Mobile Worker Gap

Quick Answer: IT operations automation depends on data most IT teams don’t have. Fewer than 10% of mobile-worker technology interruptions are ever reported, and up to 30% of workers give up reporting altogether — leaving IT without the visibility it needs to move from reactive support to AI-driven operations. Connect Inc’s white paper argues that IT operations automation has to start at the frontline: closing the feedback gap between mobile workers and IT with digital, on-device reporting paired with automated root-cause data. Without that foundation, AI and automation strategies are built on incomplete information about how the business actually runs.

Introduction

As manufacturing, logistics, retail and healthcare enterprises push toward IT operations automation and AI-driven support, most are building that strategy on an incomplete picture. The use of mobile applications to facilitate work is now a competitive requirement across these industries, which makes the mobile-user experience a business priority — yet it’s the part of the operation IT can see the least.

Mobile workers report technology-related work interruptions verbally or manually, not digitally, to IT and the business. This leads to several challenges:

• Lack of visibility: IT Service teams receiving verbal complaints lack the required visibility into the mobile-user experience to accurately determine the causes of reported interruptions.
• Executive blind spot: Executives lack a clear understanding of how existing technology performance impacts business and customer outcomes.

Incorporating digital technology and a process that directly informs IT Service teams of incidents and associated root causes quickly improves the frontline experience and drives a technology strategy focused on performance.

In this paper, we discuss:

• How transformative technology advancements are carrying IT Service Operations from legacy to digital.
• Why this transition advances continuous operational improvement, labor cost controls, and customer retention.
• How this approach facilitates aligning IT and business to drive successful technology innovation and investment.

IT and Operations do not share a single source of truth to evaluate and improve the mobile-worker’s experience in mission-critical or customer-facing tasks.

The Mobile-Worker’s Technology Experience

The term “mobile worker” covers almost any remote or deskless employee with a repeating and task-focused job enabled by mobile computers, as well as “cobots” — humans in collaboration with autonomous mobile robots (AMR) and digital applications. This means that without the full functionality of their enabling technology, completing tasks becomes difficult or impossible.

The period mobile employees are remote is often referred to as “in the wild.”

Encounters “in the Wild”

In the wild, away from IT managers or technical support resources, diverse types of issues arise that interrupt their work. These issues can be categorized into two main types:

• One type is immediately resolvable with a known process, such as a battery requiring a replacement or charge.
• Other types are technical issues that are intermittent and without an obvious cause or mitigation procedure. These issues interrupt workflows and are not immediately resolvable.

Common Intermittent Interruptions

Repeating but intermittent interruptions most commonly manifest as either:

• Slowness or delays in a screen advancing (colloquially referred to as the “wheel of death”)
• A blank screen
• A “drop” or disconnect
• Any number of examples that render the mobile computer temporarily unusable

In many cases the mobile worker may recover functionality with a reboot or device swap. Clocking in at 3 minutes on average to stop, reboot and login, this workaround can quickly add up to significant lost time and productivity.

When the mobile worker is customer-facing, the waiting and frustration of the employee may result in a poor customer experience, which directly impacts revenue.

Current Methods and Rates of Communicating Feedback

The most common means for mobile workers to give feedback to a manager about tech-related issues is in-person.

Other reporting methods available:

• Corporate internal messaging (Teams, Slack)
• SMS
• A process to open a support ticket with the IT helpdesk

However, these more formal reporting methods are a rarity in manufacturing and distribution environments.

Why reporting is low:

• Incentives: Mobile workers are often incentivized to complete production or customer service tasks more quickly with rewards that increase their take-home pay.
• Time cost of reporting: Initiative-taking employees who run into tech-related issues want to report these issues; however, reporting means stopping their work to find a manager or call it in, which may waste more time than the issue itself.

Impact on workarounds: Workarounds to speed processes may involve skipping scans of products, causing missing items for orders and directly impacting customers.

Key Statistic: Less than 10% of mobile workflow interruptions are reported to the business.

The IT Support Experience and the Mobile Worker

The Triage Gap

Once a report is given to a manager, it is out of the mobile worker’s hands and either in the hands of their supervisor or a helpdesk. Feedback is generally qualitative in nature and filtered through a local or onsite supervisor, as is typically the situation in a store, warehouse or manufacturing facility.

Unstructured feedback and reporting leads to a need for a technician to query the worker directly and/or an attempt to recreate the issue before it can be understood well enough to move to troubleshooting and diagnostic steps. This is both a time and information gap we call the “triage gap.”

Without an adequate capture of the reported problem, the support technician uses trial and error to test resolution. This is time consuming and has a low chance of success, driving up support costs while lowering efficiency for both IT support and the mobile worker.

Key Statistic: As many as 30% of workers surveyed gave up reporting issues altogether (Independent research, B2M Solutions, 2019; and Connect Inc data analysis of enterprise customers).

It is during the triage gap when workarounds become entrenched. Workers:

• Hide assets
• Avoid areas of the warehouse
• Report a loss of motivation leading to productivity delays

In customer-service-facing situations, avoidance of interactions and inability to quickly access information degrades customer service and may result in loss of revenue or loss of the customer entirely.

Business and IT Misalignment

Recreating Issues and Accountability Avoidance

From a resolution process standpoint, inaccurate triage and lack of problem capture or a data-driven root cause determination leads to accountability avoidance for both internal teams and vendors. Due to the tightly coupled nature of the networks, applications and edge devices required for optimal functionality at the edge, it is common for vendors and support owners to claim “no fault found” and push the troubleshooting responsibility to another group. Most vendor technicians wait to see evidence that their system domain is contributing to the problem before making changes.

Mishandling of Support Requests

Where 3rd party organizations are utilized as an IT helpdesk, or internal helpdesks are organized similarly, mishandling of the support request can lead to a scripted response with the goal of closing the ticket but not solving the problem. Rate of ticket closure is a helpful metric for a helpdesk that uses closed tickets as a proxy for resolution, or for billing the customer. Consistently, a low number of helpdesk or support requests implies to IT management that the mobile workforce is having a relatively good experience. For the reasons outlined here, this is a mistaken assumption that has consequences for the business such as:

• Operational cost increases
• Productivity loss
• Revenue loss
• Customer dissatisfaction

Mischaracterizations of the mobile-user experience feed into business alignment with IT management. The use of inaccurate and inadequate information for decisions relating to IT infrastructure and edge technology directly affects the frontline mobile worker and their operational goals.

The misalignment cycle:

• Faulty Decisions — Poor choices based on flawed data.
• Misaligned IT — Technology not supporting business goals.
• Mobile-User Reality — Disconnect with how mobile users operate.
• Mischaracterized UX — Inaccurate understanding of user experience.

Why IT Operations Automation Requires Understanding the Mobile-User Experience

Assessing Acceptable Risk

IT infrastructure, software applications, networks, and mobile computers are the key components that contribute to the mobile-user experience. Enterprises invest heavily into these components, as well as into the related support and maintenance of the entire system.

The cost of those investments pales in comparison to the annual cost of labor in manufacturing, distribution, and retail. Yet most enterprises do not continuously track the link between technology uptime and performance to frontline labor, representing business and shareholder risk.

IT Operations Automation: Technology Strategy and Planning

Planning for technology purchases, changes, services, and other budgeting decisions also depends on how the business perceives technology needs at the frontline. This is where IT operations automation planning has to begin — with an accurate picture of current performance, not assumptions.

Innovation projects start with looking at problems that cannot be solved with the existing technology and processes. This raises critical questions:

• How can accurate and effective technology strategy and planning decisions be made without an accounting of the current technology performance and impacts to frontline workers and, by extension, customers?
• How can a company chart their path to the next horizon if there is not a clear understanding of where they are now?

Bridging the Gaps: The Path to IT Operations Automation

In order to stay competitive with technology innovation and change, control costs, and grow a supply chain enterprise, it is important to identify and bridge existing technology, process, and visibility gaps quickly and effectively. Closing these gaps is the practical starting point for IT operations automation. The fundamental gaps that continuously degrade the mobile worker’s technology experience — and therefore the business — are:

• Verbal or manual reporting mechanisms between frontline mobile workers, IT Service Operations and Operations.
• Lack of relevant details to characterize and recreate mobile-user issues for root cause analysis.
• Limited or discreet analytics that do not characterize the mobile user’s experience within the complex and tightly coupled systems on which it depends.
• Requirements on enterprise IT service teams to learn, manage and become fluent in multiple 3rd party logging and analysis tools to understand and resolve causes of mobile or robot enabled worker downtime.

Utilizing technology and related services that enable digital processes and visibility, data-driven triage, and automated synchronization of relevant data results in an ITSM program that effectively automates the information gathering and sharing needed for understanding the mobile worker’s experience and the impacts on business goals.

The key requirements of a system that effectively optimizes the mobile-user experience are:

• On-device reporting — Digital reporting mechanisms accessible to mobile workers in the wild, sending real-time feedback into a monitoring system capable of isolating each mobile user’s interaction with the live IT system.
• Digital problem capture — Data about the mobile device’s interaction with the connected infrastructure before, during and after the time frame of the worker’s submitted feedback or automated detection.
• Unbiased root-cause alerts — A notification mechanism that shares unbiased root cause analytics with the correct system owners for action, resolution and accountability.
• Users in context of IT — Consistent, always-on observability of users within the system for performance metrics, resolution validation and curated analytics for a variety of business and IT alignment projects, including innovation.

Together, these four capabilities make up what the paper calls Mobile Intelligence.

Documented Outcomes of IT Operations Automation

The recommendations presented here align with fundamental practices for improving business success by increasing customer satisfaction while lowering the costs to deliver products and services. These are the documented outcomes of IT operations automation done well: measurable gains in labor efficiency, customer retention, and IT cost control.

Employment, Labor Efficiency, and Direct and Indirect Labor Cost Reduction

A labor force that is enabled to communicate feedback digitally reports higher morale and job satisfaction. Removing feedback barriers clears a path to increasing efficiency in workflows.

In cases where workers are incentivized by compensation or advancement for their efficiency or customer satisfaction ratings, providing a means to give feedback empowers them to align their own career goals with the business mission.

Reducing unintended overtime, providing tools to increase efficiency, and reducing turnover reduces both direct and indirect labor costs.

Key Outcome: Documented and consistent improvements in the mobile-worker experience result in a cascade of cost reductions and competitive advantages. Positive workforce reviews, for example, retain workers and make it easier to attract desirable candidates.

Customer Experience and Retention

The link between labor morale and retention with customer experience and retention needs no further explanation. A layperson who knows nothing of mobile technology shares the frustration of a delayed delivery, slow customer service or an inaccurate order.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Mobile workers who are less frustrated, enabled and empowered to be successful in their work because of optimized technology increase the chances of delivering on-time, accurate orders and help increase the satisfaction of customers.

IT Operations Automation Reduces Cost and Drives Innovation

IT operations automation shifts an IT Service Operation’s focus from fielding incidents and investigating problems to resolution activities, driving down the cost to implement, manage, support and advance technology initiatives.

By digitizing and automating the process to share feedback while eliminating investigative steps, IT Service Operations functionality streamlines time.

The streamlined process improves resource allocation and delivery of IT functions.

Driving Success Through IT Operations Automation

IT operations automation isn’t a switch IT can flip on its own — it starts with closing the communication and visibility gap between IT Service Operations teams and mobile workers. That shift advances IT support functions from reactive and manual to proactive and digital. IT transforms its core functionality from supporting end-users to optimizing the user experience. Tracking the success of this transformation is inherent in the technology requirements to automate the support of mobile workers.

The Importance of Open Communication

As manufacturing, distribution, logistics, retail and healthcare sectors race to incorporate the use of automation to increase business outcomes, it is critical that the lines of communication between the daily users of enterprise technology systems, IT Service Operations and executive leadership are:

• Open
• Accessible
• Meaningful

Whether it is a mobile hardware upgrade or the inclusion of robotics and AI into mobile workflows, digitally enabled, data-driven communication and action is critical to meeting business goals.

When these requirements are met, user experience ties directly to problem analytics, and the resulting actions needed for improvement are accessible and actionable. An enterprise that incorporates mobile-user experience into its core business performance metrics drives improvements and innovations more effectively and at a lower cost.

The Value of IT Operations Automation for IT Departments

A lower-cost and better-performing IT department carries value to technology strategy, design, and implementation. Access to critical metrics:

• Reduces testing and deployment cycles for technology change and innovation.
• Provides the ability to observe and evaluate critical IT systems during change, which is a significant cost-control measure when those changes directly impact mission-critical operations.

When technology advancements involve enabling frontline workers with robotics and automation, the critical nature of understanding the worker experience with those technologies increases — as does the cost-benefit ratio for streamlining IT Service Operations. This is the groundwork IT operations automation depends on: without frontline visibility, automation and AI strategy are built on guesswork instead of data.

By Shari Christofferson, Chris Christofferson, and Greg Kling, Connect Inc.

Originally published as a Connect Inc. white paper, 2024, “Transforming IT Operations for Automation and AI.”

About the Authors

Chris Christofferson, CEO/CTO of Connect Inc, leads product development, management and engineering.

Greg Kling, VP of Support and Engineering, interfaces daily with enterprise IT teams to understand and improve processes.

Shari Christofferson, President, aligns with customers and partners to analyze frontline and IT systems that support the digitization and automation requirements for Digital Transformation and Industry 4.0.

---

Connect Inc. specializes in transforming IT operations through automation and AI, helping enterprises bridge the gap between mobile workers and IT service operations to drive digital transformation and improve business outcomes.

Copyright Connect Inc, 2024.

Download this complementary e-book to learn how shifting the perspective from reactive log analysis and problem recreation to direct user-feedback and problem replay is transforming IT Operations for automation and AI in distribution, retail, manufacturing and logistics.