The cost of broken IT in the workplace

When it's working well, workplace IT is a promoter of cost-effectiveness and a driver of employee efficiency.

When it's working well, IT just sits unnoticed in the background, out of sight, out of mind, and just "works".

But when it goes wrong, workplace IT can be an expensive anchor, destroyer of efficiency, and source of reduced morale.

In fact, according to research, the cost of downtime as a direct result of IT going wrong sits at about £3.6m a year.

As well as the direct financial cost, there is also the lost efficiency with research suggesting that staff lose about 545 hours of productivity every year because of IT outages.

The bigger problem businesses have, is that the current model for desk-side IT support is inefficient and ineffective, resulting in further hours of lost time and morale while engineers try to fix problems and employees are forced to watch IT staff go through endless procedures to arrive at the same conclusion - we'll need to organise a site visit to solve the problem.

The reason IT desk-side support doesn't work as well as it should - and could - is that it relies very heavily on human touch-points to get anything done.

Downtime in IT and digital workplace devices is inevitable given that they naturally deteriorate over time and require upgrades and improvements - which always seems to happen at the worst possible time when you're in the middle of something really important.

The real detrimental effect remains in the fact that IT desk-side support teams have to spend much of their current working day acting as glorified parcel delivery men, bringing new devices and configuring them on the spot - while the employee is forced to watch and wait.

Considering that our lives as consumers is now so driven by convenience and improving that magical "user experience", it is staggering that internal support services still seem so far away from this way of working.

Especially when new and available technology could solve many of these problems.

Take Amazon's introduction of convenient Smart Lockers and "click and collect", which allows consumers to pick up items from a designated area at a time that is convenient for them.

This has completely dismantled the old model which forced consumers to wait at home for hours for a specific delivery slot (if they were lucky) and waste much of their day sitting around and waiting.

This is a familiar scenario no doubt for anyone who has worked in an office, or anywhere for that matter.

Imagine bringing the use of this Smart Locker, click-and-collect and cloud-integrated platform into B2B and, more specifically, IT desk-side support.

Allowing employees to raise tickets electronically through an online portal - rather than calling desk-side support - would start to remove the human touchpoints which so often cause problems in IT.

Having raised their issue, the employee could be given the option to "order" a temporary replacement device through the portal and pick it up at a designated Smart Locker close to where they work - maybe even in the same building.

Without having picked up the phone, the employee would - within minutes - be able to take their broken equipment to a locker, replace it with their new device and be up and working in a fraction of the time. 

This process could be completed in minutes - rather than days - while the actual technical work would be carried out in the background.

Once the employee's original device has been fixed, they can return to the locker and swap it out for their own device and begin work again.

A dedicated single-use digital collection bar-code ensures that only the employee can access the locker - ensuring complete audit trail and security of devices - while the technical work carried out in the background is also secure.

Not only would this remove the headaches for employees and drastically speed up the time it would take for them to have issues solved, it would also free up IT staff from their delivery roles and give them the time to focus on exceptions and digital transformation projects.

For the business, it would also create the impression of a company in which IT matters just "got fixed" rather than one of being unable to deal with issues effectively.

Using Smart Lockers to help automate the role of desk-side IT support provides ROI for businesses, confidence for employees, and freedom to IT support.

That sounds like a win/win/win doesn't it?

If you want to know how to implement Velocity Smart Lockers into your business' IT desk-side support, why not download our latest eBook.