Who Do Desktops Matter to?

Let’s get straight to the answer: everyone.

The desktop is the single application that everyone in an organization touches every day and it’s the one application that can promote or devastatingly halt productivity. At the end of the day, an unproductive workforce has impacts on every level of an organization:

• End users get frustrated, which negatively effects morale
• Managers don’t meet goals and are dealing with unhappy employees
• IT is under pressure to identify and fix the issue
• Executives aren’t hitting numbers and have to answer to the board

Desktops are so ubiquitous that they’re not often thought about a business tool, or even a business critical application. But when you stop to think about it, they absolutely are.

Not only are desktops the cornerstone of corporate productivity, they can also be the gateway to a wealth of insights and information. Because they’re the portal used to engage with every other application and digital business function, desktop usage can tell companies if expensive applications are being used, what employees are spending their time on and if the desktops themselves are properly (or wastefully) resourced. It’s all a matter of how companies choose to look at the desktop. Is it a necessary but unimportant application? Or is it one of the most fundamental and powerful tools in the organization?

Turning Desktops Into Powerful Business Tools

In this age of big data and analytics-driven decisions, it’s silly for organizations to overlook such a potentially powerful indicator. But getting the most out of desktops means understanding their place throughout the organization. Each organizational persona has different expectations and demands of the desktop.

The Turning Desktops Into Powerful Tools guide breaks organizations down into five major personas:

• Everyday end users
• Help deck and support staff
• Engineers and administrators
• Business Managers
• Executives

While there are some commonalities, there are many important differences in how each of these personas thinks about desktops and what they can ultimately get out of the application. To help you think deeper about desktops, the guide explores each persona in terms of:

• What that persona really wants from their desktop experience
• The common challenges that stand in the way of achieving that goal
• How a poor desktop experience for that persona impacts the rest of the organization (yes, it really does!)
• The ultimate goal of a desktop within that persona

High performance is the baseline for every persona, but the higher up the “persona food chain” you get, the more the persona can also benefit from (and may actually need) desktops with deep analytics such as usage metrics and historical trend mapping.

As organizations search for cost savings measures and a way to get ahead of the competition, looking forward for innovations is important. But so is making sure the company is taking full advantage of all the pieces it currently has in place … and that includes the little old everyday desktop.

Guide Excerpt

Here’s a snippet from Turning Desktops Into Powerful Tools:

Engineers and admins are also dealing with a shift in how software solutions are purchased and implemented. While traditionally these decisions went through IT, they are increasingly being made at the department level, leaving engineers and admins to deal with a sprawling solution footprint and the associated computing resource requirements (which may differ from the resources implemented when the desktop was initially purchased or provisioned).

Once a device or desktop has been issued, engineers and admins traditionally have little insight into how it’s performing and if it has the correct resources. Not having this information leaves them unable to make adjustments, potentially resulting in frustrated users without enough computing power or wasted resources in over-provisioned situations.

Read the rest of the guide >>