Have you ever had that discussion on who is responsible for end user complaints and general experience issues? Pretty much most organisations I have been to see during my career always reference the point of “I am not sure on that, it’s another team’s responsibility” or when there is an issue, it is anybody else’s problem but an infrastructure team or database administrator! Especially when it comes down to application performance.
When you look into what makes up end user experience there are a few key areas:
- Service Delivery
- Are the people on your helpdesk friendly? Do they keep the end users up to date? Do they answer the phones in a timely manner?
- Infrastructure Services
- Is the network, storage and compute functioning within reasonable parameters? Are any of the resources hitting peak utilisation? Is something down? Does something need rebooting regularly? How often does maintenance occur?
- Desktop and Application Access
- Is the end user experience consistent independent of end point? Do your users need access to 100 applications? Do they even need desktops? Are they mobile? Who owns application purchase? is the end point estate consistent? Have you deployed and managed consistently your applications? Do you have a user environment package or at least roaming profiles? Are your applications what your end users want? Are your endpoints what your users want?
- User Training / Updates
- Do your users know how to use the applications? Is the access to the systems(s) intuitive? What communication has occurred?
All of the above contribute towards a form of user experience, and the list could go on! The key message is that it is not just one person’s or departments responsibility, whether you look after databases, networks, storage, VDI, service delivery etc, if one piece of the puzzle is struggling then this will have a negative impact on your end user experience. End user experience is not just resolved by a EUC/Workspace team, or even an implementation of a new solution/technology like virtual desktops or applications it usually encompasses a much larger step change within an organisation.
