Shopping 5.0 – The core of the consumerization ecosystem

The radical shift in the end-user expectations from IT has resulted in a fundamental change in organizations’ approach to providing services to end-users. Most IT managers and service providers are keen to implement systems and solutions which not only bring excellent and rich user experience but also fit well with the existing processes.
The traditional process for end-user requests often consists of many steps which can include prioritization, approval, verification, and manual delivery. The process of monitoring and reporting are generally driven through service desk or ticketing systems.
One of the key challenges which organizations face with solutions around end-user requests and delivery is integration with existing systems. Many times the introduction of a new system requires duplication of efforts around reporting or SLA monitoring. If the new system requires changes to the existing processes of reporting and monitoring then the efforts involved in adoption of the new system increases significantly.
Shopping 5.0 revolutionizes the experience for enterprise end-users. End-users get a modern and rich app store which they can use for self-service of the software or service they need, in a way with which they are familiar. With automation of delivery of the requests, end-users get quicker fulfillment of the request resulting in huge improvements in their productivity and satisfaction.
What makes Shopping a core part of IT consumerization options is the flexible and open-ended integration capabilities. Not only does Shopping 5.0 deliver an excellent user experience for end-users, it also ensures that the other systems of the request and delivery ecosystem continue working the same way without any significant changes to the processes. For many customers the demonstration of the integration capabilities of Shopping resulted in quicker decision-making during the deployment process.
For a retail customer Shopping was being deployed as a part of an end-user services transformation project. Initial feedback from the pilot users was excellent and they loved using Shopping. Many of the pilot users couldn’t believe that the software they requested was actually installed when they received the email saying their request had been fulfilled and they could go ahead use the software. However this customer was using a ticketing tool which did not provide rich API (like web service, SQL) for integration with any external systems. The main interface provided by the ticketing tool was through email. Email was being used as the main mechanism for any to-and-fro system interactions. Working as a part of the project delivery team, we easily extended Shopping’s integration capabilities whereby we enabled triggering emails to the ticketing system at the right milestone in the workflow process. We also enabled reading mails from the system mailbox to allow status changes to the existing tickets.
The Shopping implementation for the above customer made sure that all the key stakeholders were satisfied and it did not require them to make wholesale changes to their existing systems around reporting and SLA monitoring through their ticketing system.