Secondly it brings the vision of the “one stop shop” for enterprise IT much closer. Independent research house, Vanson Bourne, recently found that 35% of knowledge workers don’t have the software they need to work effectively outside the office and yet only 17% have access to self-serve capabilities. This seems incredible given the push from the big vendors to have some kind of self-serve capability for their major product lines. But perhaps, herein lays the problem. The big vendors have self-serve built around their flagship offerings or core capabilities with some basic ‘ticking the box’ level integrations for other vendors.
The challenge here is that IT departments are left with four choices:
- Pick one and accept that users get a two-tone experience
- Adopt each vendor’s self-service options and have a proliferation of portals and complexity
- Do nothing
- Adopt a big-vendor agnostic “one stop shop”; one engineered for heterogenous / multi-vendor world
It seems that, given the 17% stat, IT departments have defaulted to number three, but this is a huge missed opportunity to delight and provide a wonderful digital experience. At the very least, this might remove a huge point of frustration as the same research showed that 74% of users wait hours, days or weeks for their issues to be resolved through classic more manual approaches.
Let’s talk about option four – 1E Shopping
Every organization will have a heterogenous environment made-up of many different technologies. Even organizations that are “all-in” on the journey to Microsoft Modern Management will take time to consolidate and there will likely always be significant need to interoperate with other goliaths like ServiceNow especially when considering user requests and fulfillment.
Shopping 6.0 plays nicely with:
- Microsoft ConfigMgr (for Software & Operating System upgrades & migration)
- Microsoft Intune
- Microsoft Store for Business
- IBM BigFix
- Active Directory (for file access, SharePoint & Teams and Distribution lists)
- ServiceNow for fulfillment of more complex or physical requests (such as printers)
- 1E Tachyon platform for Digital Experience issues or self-heal
Simplicity
Wrapping this up in a simple interface has been critical as users’ expectations are now set by B2C technology. Version 6.0 of 1E Shopping also includes new UI helping enterprise IT keep pace with the hyper consumerized look and feel that is now expected.
It sounds like a small element of the story especially alongside the more technical integration capabilities, but our experiences show that one of the key barriers to adoption to self-service technology is the user friendliness. If users don’t love it, they’re far more likely to pick up the phone and create a ticket. We’re confident in saying that Shopping 6 is not only the most polished version yet, but also the most pleasing one on the market.
If you’d like to see a demo of Shopping 6.0 in action or perhaps evaluate it, please get in touch.
