I spend a lot of time thinking about how IT organizations can become digital humanists and how using the process of design thinking leads to more lasting innovation and game-changing customer-centric solutions. But what does this mean for the IT organization whose job it is to keep the lights on? You’re not designing and developing the next great customer app; you’re troubleshooting laptop issues, managing IT tickets, and keeping the servers running through a system-wide upgrade.
For these organizations, becoming a digital humanist becomes even more imperative. You might be thinking “Why? They’re going to come to us whether they like it or not.” Well, that may have been true in the past, but the shifting demographic in the workforce, the prevalence of BYOD, and the availability of self-serve troubleshooting from search engines like Google has changed everything. Internal IT organizations have to figure out how to get in front of their internal customers’ needs and deliver a great service or risk irrelevance.
Consider the following:
- PwC’s Millenial’s at Work study says that Millennials expect the technologies that empower their personal lives to also drive communication and innovation in the workplace. 59% said that an employer’s provision of state-of-the art technology was important to them when considering a job.
- A GigaOM study of Millennials in the workplace found that 60% don’t look to company IT first for tech support.
- The same study found that 71% have searched for a tech support answer on Google at least once.
What does all this mean? It means IT’s customer is no longer “the corporation.” It’s the individual employees, and these employee populations are as diverse as the general population they are drawn from. When they leave work and return to their personal lives, they not only take their work and work tools with them, they apply to those tools the same expectation for performance, utility, usability, and support that they have of the resources provided to them by their bank or favorite clothing store.
The successful IT organization of the future treats colleagues as customers because it has reinvented itself to be completely customer centric. How did they get here, and what are the three characteristics they share? I’ll talk about that in my next post.