Productivity plays a huge role in a company’s financial health. Recent data from McKinsey & Company shows that productivity has barely grown in the U.S. (1.4%) since 2005. They also estimate that boosting U.S. productivity represents a $10 trillion opportunity.

Few teams feel the effects of unproductive work quite like IT. Their teams are typically small, and yet their work is overwhelming and mission-critical to keeping businesses moving forward. For instance, countless SaaS applications are now integral to the operations of every company, and yet one, often lean team is responsible for their upkeep and management.

That makes IT operations a potential bottleneck. Unsurprisingly, according to Evanta (a Gartner company), CIOs say increasing efficiency and productivity are top priorities for 2023.

The Manual Trap

SaaS applications, from project management, CRM and collaboration to MarTech and expense tools, are inseparable from our daily work. And our IT stacks are continuously increasing, with companies worldwide using an average of 130 apps in 2022.

My experience in the IT space has taught me that most IT teams still manage SaaS applications manually, attempting to track their licenses, users, and renewals via spreadsheets and provisioning/deprovisioning access to applications one by one. These bandwidth-crunched teams are wasting valuable (and expensive) time completing important yet mundane and repetitive tasks that are humanly impossible to keep up with – and, therefore, prime candidates for an automation-driven productivity boost.

The Onboarding/Offboarding Bottleneck

Two of the most time-intensive IT operations are onboarding and offboarding employees from SaaS applications.

Consider this scenario: A company is growing rapidly, hiring to fill the gaps they have across their organization to keep up with the high volume of work required to hit their increasing targets. Maybe they bulk-start new employees on one specific day, every two weeks.

If they have five employees starting on that day, IT first needs to receive the information that those employees are starting. They need to learn what departments those employees will work within and what tools are required for their roles. From there, they must provision access to those applications per employee and application. Endless Slack messages, clunky application backends and likely incomplete information eat up their day.

By the time they finish provisioning that group of new hires, the next group is likely just about to start. Any failures along that scattered onboarding process create a less-than-ideal onboarding experience and derail a new employee’s initial productivity.

On the flip side of this process is offboarding employees.

Manual offboarding requires IT to work with a departing employee’s manager to learn what apps they used (a less than scientific endeavor, particularly when you consider that many employees subscribe to apps on their own without others’ knowledge), and then manually deprovision them from every application. Beyond the time sink for IT, there is also a risk factor — failing to deprovision an employee from even one could leave sensitive company information accessible.

While handling these critical tasks in this manner is inefficient, it’s also indicative of the wasteful nature of manual IT operations. IT pros are highly technical and talented. Having them spend their time on tedious tasks distracts them from working on higher-value projects.

Related: ChatGPT-Like Microsoft 365 Copilot Will Be Coming to Microsoft Productivity Apps

Increase IT Productivity Through Automation

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of organizations will implement structured automation to deliver efficiency, an increase from just 20% of organizations in 2021.

Despite that, Torii’s  survey of over 200 IT professionals found that less than half of respondents have fully automated most tasks, and only 13% reported great success with automation.

So what’s stopping IT from automating? Time: 58% cite insufficient staffing or time as significant challenges in automation implementation. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

The only way forward is through investing in tools that help manage their SaaS stack, that also include intuitive automation capabilities.

Investing in any old automation, won’t cut it either. In the context of IT, how that automation integrates and interacts with your SaaS stack is key.

Solutions such as SaaS Management Platforms, with automation built-in, provide the visibility IT needs to understand their SaaS stack and associated users and costs, as well as with the actionability required to manage it.

For the onboarding/offboarding bottleneck, this means automatically discovering and surfacing every application in use at your company, first and foremost. From that point of centralized visibility, you can create workflows that automate previously time-intensive tasks (and eliminate the chance of things falling through the cracks) to free up your IT staff’s time (and improve results).

For example, the system can detect which department new hires work in and automatically provision access to the applications they’ll require. Equally for offboarding, when an employee leaves — since you’re aware of every application they’re utilizing, the same platform can automatically deprovision them once triggered by your IDP or HRIS.

These are just small examples of the automation opportunities for IT, but when you compare them to the manual alternatives, it’s easy to imagine the productivity gains you can garner.

As companies continue looking to save costs, greater productivity could fit the bill — as it improves the value of every dollar spent.

By better using time, you’ll enable your organization to optimize resource use and focus on the objectives that drive revenue. Those that invest in productivity now stand to earn more from the efficiency gains of the future.

The post Now’s The Time to Focus on IT Productivity appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The Infinity Platform combines AV enterprise services with machine learning, computer vision and advanced computing. The platform is capable of handling a wide range of applications, from advanced data analytics and AI-driven insights to control room operations, digital signage, immersive experiences, videowalls, and local and remote operator consoles. By collaborating with NVIDIA, Userful says it plans to take the Infinity Platform to the next level, giving users even more power, flexibility and performance.

Userful’s collaboration with NVIDIA will involve aligning NVIDIA’s products for GPUs with Userful’s future platform roadmap. This will result in a more powerful and comprehensive solution that can handle even the most complex AV and data processing tasks. Using NVIDIA GPUs, the Userful Infinity Platform will be able to deliver real-time and proactive insights and help businesses improve their operational efficiency and productivity.

The Infinity Platform will soon be available to customers worldwide, and the collaboration with NVIDIA is a significant step towards creating a platform that can deliver real value to businesses across the globe. By combining Userful’s expertise in enterprise AV and videowall systems with NVIDIA GPUs, the company’s says its work is aimed at revolutionizing the way businesses approach AV, data processing and decision-making.

“Userful is excited to collaborate with NVIDIA to enhance our Infinity Platform,” says John Marshall, CEO of Userful. “Our efforts will enable Infinity to provide customers with an advanced, scalable, and versatile platform that can process and analyze data in real-time. It’s a significant milestone for Userful as we continue to expand our platform capabilities and offer businesses an innovative and cutting-edge solution for enhancing their AV and decision-making processes.”

Userful’s collaboration with NVIDIA is a testament to the power of innovation, and paves a potential path to revolutionize the use of AV within IT for a brighter future, says the company.

Another version of this article originally appeared on our sister-site Commercial Integrator on May 8, 2023. It has since been updated for My TechDecisions’ audience.

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In response, many companies have turned to employee monitoring software to track their employees’ productivity remotely, and that is leading the White House to investigate these tools and their impact on the workforce.

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is releasing a public request for information to learn more about the automated tools used by organizations to surveil, monitor and evaluate their employees with the goal of better understanding the design, deployment, prevalence and impacts of those tools.

According to a recent Microsoft report, 85% of global business decision makers say hybrid work makes it challenging to be confident in the productivity of employees, and employees may be focusing too much on productivity versus impact.

Read Next: Why Trust, Not Employee Tracking Software, Is the Answer to Productivity Paranoia

Further, 87% of employees report that they are productive regardless of where they work, but just 12% of leaders have full confidence that their team is productive, according to the Microsoft Work Trends Index.

The White House in a news release also cites a New York Times report that found that 80% of the largest private U.S. employers use employee monitoring tools to assess productivity.

According to the Biden-Harris Administration, these tools can provide some benefit, but they also introduce some risk and negative impacts.

“The constant tracking of performance can push workers to move too fast on the job, posing risks to their safety and mental health,” the Administration says in a news release. “Monitoring conversations can deter workers from exercising their rights to organize and collectively bargain with their employers. And, when paired with employer decisions about pay, discipline, and promotion, automated surveillance can lead to workers being treated differently or discriminated against.”

The Administration wants information on workers’ firsthand experiences with these tools, details from the developers of these tools and their customers on how they are developed and deployed, best practices for mitigating risks to workers, policy suggestions and other data.

Responses will help the Administration develop new policy responses and amplify best practices among employers, worker groups and technology vendors.

The post U.S. Government Wants Data on Employee Monitoring Tools appeared first on My TechDecisions.

To help administrators find guides for the services they need to deploy, Microsoft updated the search tools, recommendations and layouts for its Advanced deployment guides & assistance page in the Microsoft 365 admin center and at setup.microsoft.com. In addition, Microsoft says the new layouts include views that highlight guides for Secure Score, Compliance Score and Adoption score to help admins track key metrics over time.

The new features also give admins the ability to communicate and share deployment progress with relevant stakeholders by exporting progress in Excel and sharing as needed, the company says in a blog.

For admins that want to prioritize and focus on the highest impact services first, they can now view the most important actions front and center in the “Suggested guides” section, Microsoft says. Future updates will see the suggestions tailored to the admin’s configuration and licenses.

Outside of the admin center, admins can use setup.microsoft.com for advanced deployment guides, which includes the same guides in the admin center. This allows admins without permissions for the admin center to access the informant they need, and admins of adjacent products, partners or other stakeholders can get step-by-step deployment information.

According to Microsoft, the new setup.microsoft.com experience serves as a useful learning and guidance resource accessible those who can’t directly sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center, or who only have permissions to access other admin centers. In addition, the site can help IT professionals get informed about deployment as they discover and try Microsoft 365 services before making a purchase.

Microsoft also announced the recent release of a new advanced deployment guide for setting up a Microsoft Zero Trust security model, and the company plans in the first quarter of 2023 to release a new guide for Windows 365 Cloud PC configuration.

Learn more about these guides in Microsoft’s blog.

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According to Gartner, organizations with diverse IT-business collaborations will deliver business outcomes 25% faster than their competitors.

Automating processes is often key to accelerating these business outcomes. Process automation – i.e., digitizing processes with dedicated business applications that enable task and workflow automation – thus becomes the low-hanging fruit for digital transformation, allowing CIOs to better align IT with the organizations’ business strategy.

Related: How to Achieve Alignment Between Business & IT for Your Automation Projects

For organizations, business process automation is critical to ensuring business continuity, lowering costs, increasing margins, and reducing errors and risks. It can also improve staff morale and creativity due to a reduction in chaotic and inefficient processes. But what about the impact on the CIO and the larger IT team?

While the benefits of process automation for organizations are abundant, pursuing automation projects can deliver direct benefits for the CIO too, including:

#1 Gaining business user allies through tactical task automation

Today’s business users often need help automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks; the sort of things often handled using emails, spreadsheets, or physical paper clutter.

Though some business process automation projects are indeed pushed from the top down as part of the organization’s global strategy, a large number of them are driven bottom-up by the needs of these business users.

The “citizen development” movement – encouraging non-IT-trained employees to use low-code / no-code platforms to create business applications – seemed attractive but has proved difficult to make work and has often fallen short of expectations.

Very few citizens have the talent – let alone the desire – to build applications, and the ones who do often find it conflicting with their primary duties. When it does work, it’s usually short-cycle, short-lifespan efforts for personal tasks. Projects beyond that small, short scope require greater skills and/or access to curated resources.

In other words – it’s almost impossible to bypass IT. But it is possible to improve and augment them. And it is possible to optimize their efforts.

While IT continues to work on shared-value projects, CIOs can have them coordinate and orchestrate those small, personal, short-term tactical efforts users can do for themselves.

Procuring and promoting the use of the right tools, so IT is seen as the facilitator of citizen activity, not its nemesis, produces quick wins, yields goodwill, and whets appetites for larger-scale efforts.

That’s important because those large-scale efforts will only succeed through the collaboration of users and IT.

#2 Showing tangible evidence of productivity

Regardless of the IT project, business leaders always want to know: how can we determine, deliver on, and measure the key business outcomes of this project?

While it can be difficult to quantify the successes of simple task automation and data management efforts, process-oriented solutions typically have outcomes that are highly measurable, and thus reportable (the volume or pace of loan applications processed, for instance). Simply put, business process automation empowers CIOs to demonstrate ROI.

When the road to success on long-term, strategic IT projects (whether related to IT infrastructure, the ERP exchange, or something else) gets bumpy, being able to present process automation quick wins that positively impact the overall business becomes an ace up the CIO’s sleeve.

#3 Turning “can’t” into “can”

Building and maintaining business applications doesn’t have to consume a large number of up-front resources or require orchestrating a cacophony of otherwise-disconnected moving parts before a single step can be taken.

When CIOs treat business applications as process automation projects, they can begin with the work to be done, not the assets to be managed.

When approached with an agile mindset based on continuous feedback, business process automation enables the CIO to quickly deliver applications that are consistent, maintainable, and can evolve over time to include ambitious assets.

But along the way, such efforts yield regularly expanding positive results. That persistent positive sentiment is invaluable to gaining trust among business stakeholders.

#4 Delivering more value to the C-Suite

The modern CIO is ultimately responsible for not only creating a healthy IT infrastructure, but also efficient information dissemination that empowers the C-suite to make better decisions faster and execute them effectively.

Often processes are assumed, inferred, and ad-hoc. While a process might exist, it might have inconsistent outcomes and be poorly understood – which means efforts to improve it might be doomed before they begin.

Often, a benefit of automating a process is to formally document it for the first time – which then starts the journey toward better efforts and outcomes.

With workflow automation, processes become visible, transparent, well-governed, standardized, and auditable, meeting that requirement by providing management with strategic insights, indispensable to corporate growth.

This solidifies the CIO’s role as not just a valued member of the strategic leadership team, but a change instigator, turning digital transformation strategy into reality to create a modern workplace that improves how people work and how the company operates.

By stepping outside the confined IT role, the CIO can help drive true innovation and transform the company into a data-driven enterprise.

In conclusion

I never need to hear about “saving time and money” or buzzwords like “streamlined efficiency” again. It’s not that those terms, and those goals, don’t matter – they do – but at this point, they’re a baseline expectation.

What matters is where you’re saving time and money through streamlined efficiency, how you’re choosing to do it to, and what long-term cumulative cultural changes will happen within your organization as a result.

Only CIOs who balance business and technical skills are in a position to get this right.

The post 4 Ways Process Automation Pays Off for the CIO appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Everyone works differently, and managers are tasked with shifting their management style to accommodate each employee under their supervision.

Now, managers are getting a crash course in how to manage remote workers, but with user experience management software, managers can stay in touch with their employees without having to hound them about their productivity.

According to Brian Berns, CEO of management software company Knoa, managers can use this software to tell who is struggling and why they’re struggling.

How are employees coping with working from home?

For at least two months, employees in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world have been forced to work from home due to government-imposed lockdowns to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Organizations are adapting well to the change. Initially, productivity was down, but it has started to move back up as employees get more comfortable and find their groove, Berns says.

“Business is not being conducted the same way,” Berns says. “For example, we have a client that runs a network of pharmacies, and they’ve seen huge demand. They have to order and they have to deal with stock levels. And they’ve been able to manage to operate in the new normal, with just a slight increase in user sessions required to run the business.”

How to tell when employees are struggling

With platforms like Knoa, managers can gain insight into their employees work habits and keep tabs on how well they’re doing at home.

Transaction time

Berns said one important metric to track is how long it takes an employee to complete a transaction now versus how long it took them to do the same task in the past.

“So I can tell you that it’s taking them longer to complete a transaction,” says Berns. “And that’s what we’re seeing today. We’re seeing that users, the systems that they’re using are not are not working as efficiently. They’re getting more error messages and they’re frustrated.”

Idle time

Another important metric, according to Berns, is idle time.

For example, say an employee is shipping a product. That process typically takes 20 steps, but after step 12, there’s a delay. If that forms a consistent pattern, you know there’s not an arbitrary reason.

Idle time can also be an indicator of personal struggles and an inability to adapt to such a big change.

Perhaps the employee is dealing with family issue or is having financial trouble that is causing them to be idle longer than usual.

When tech meets HR

Software like Knoa can help inform managers and HR leaders which employees need additional resources or support.

Many workers are now becoming familiar with video chat platforms and collaboration apps, but there may have been little to no training provided.

If you have insight into what platforms employees struggle with, managers can provide that support and offer additional training.

On a human level, employees’ productivity could plummet if they’re having other personal issues adapting to the change.

With software like Knoa, managers and HR leaders will be armed with that information to make a change.

“If you’re having a problem getting food shipped to you, you know, let’s help you, whatever it might be, but how what we’re providing is the information and the insight into where the challenges are so you can be proactive,” Berns says.

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