Consumerization Drives IT Leader to Become Business Owner

Two articles in the November 2019 issues of the Berkshire IT Leadership newsletter, ”Running IT Like a Business” by Paul Edmisten and “IT 1.0 or IT 2.0” by Vaughn Merlyn, inspired Shawn Genoway to share with his "lessons learned" transitioning from problem-solving cost reducer to business-value creator at Citrix. 

Over 20 years Shawn built and led the IT Operations and Support function at Citrix as the company grew from small niche player to S&P 500 component. Along the way, he co-wrote a bestselling book about Citrix and earned himself a reputation among Citrix customers as an expert in Service Delivery, Operations, Network Management, and Systems Integration.  

In 2012, I wrote "Embracing the Consumerization of IT: a BYOD Case Study" about approaches, challenges, and considerations to implementing a BYOD program at Citrix. That first step in the consumerization of IT sparked a re-evaluation for us. 

Our Service Management thinking was rooted in ticket management where we simply reacted to an employee entering a ticket to report an incident and consume our service. We believed that the end game was delivering service cheaper and faster.

That mindset meant we missed an opportunity up the value chain … the value-add opportunity of never taking the employee out of their “moment” … whatever that point in time might be - writing code, selling a product, supporting external customers, closing financials… to be additive, not subtractive, to support the transactions employees perform every day to make the company profitable and drive value.

We weren’t alone as my peers at our customers around the world told me they were experiencing the same thing.  

Yes, cost savings and cost avoidance were important, but the real opportunity was to differentiate. To abandon the "if we build it, they must come" mentality, to adopt a competitive mindset, to embrace consumer concepts like supply chain, costs of goods sold, brand recognition, service experience, and to distinguish between value-add versus commodity services.

To regain relevance and advantage in a competitive consumer-based, shadow/business IT, cloud-based landscape required us to understand employee consumption and better align ourselves with the business.

Tipping Point for IT Losing “Market Share”

After our BYOD program in 2009, rapid changes in technology and corporate culture brought us to a tipping point.

•  The introduction of the iPad in 2010 and the flood of devices into the workplace meant my team couldn't keep up and had to move quickly from managing the device to managing the service.
• Employee choice entered the workplace in everything from mobile devices to furniture.
• Employees began comparing internal IT to their external shopping and support experience.
• Apple’s success had the IT world embracing human-centered design thinking - User Interface, User Experience, and Service Experience moved to center stage. 

On the front end, employees now had an opinion of what good looked like and weren’t shy about challenging us on it. Our stark offerings and harsh position on standards, look, and feel didn't cut it anymore.

On the back end, we spent a lot of time saying “no” to the business, asking that they understand our corporate constraints shackled by governance, security, compliance, standards, and internal oversight.  For every "no" we uttered, they circumvented IT to accomplish their objectives; 3rd party software, non-standard hardware, shadow/business IT, cloud-based SaaS/PaaS/IaaS … they were consuming it all on a credit card. 

These foundations of the collective digital transformation added up to a wholesale change that eroded our position as guru and gatekeeper.

Regaining Market Share

I realized that our continued relevancy depended on our ability to compete. Demonstrating value-add to the transaction (e.g. automation, leading indicators, platforms, infrastructure, and security) and to shareholders would determine our longevity.

I asked the team to look at all the touchpoints of our IT service offerings, and ask themselves “Where do we differentiate?”  There were superb answers; “stellar at closing tickets quickly”, “we run a tight operations group”, “we implement projects like a champion”, “hit five 9s”, “IT headcount per employee ratio is off the charts”.  Great people tirelessly doing a great job, ticket after ticket after ticket, but already being done by outsourcing providers and competitors ready to take our “business”. 

But the business and employees told us something different.  Our reliance on quantitative measures had us assuming our users were happy but when I asked, I discovered significant pockets of discontent for critical systems, services, and programs.

• They wanted us to recover more quickly from major incidents that were revenue impacting or had outages and resolve minor incidents even faster.
•  Our services were confusing as we tried to be all things to everybody but were nothing to nobody. Our services often varied based on location. New hires or someone traveling encountered different services and service levels from place to place.
•  Our Knowledge Base varied from place-to-place and individual support people often had different fixes for the same reoccurring issue making out process appear complicated and broken. 

We were intelligent, passionate, dedicated, service orientated, and able to fix problems as they occurred but not addressing the underlying condition that the business landscape had shifted. We had to compete or lose.

A Shift from IT Leader to Business Owner

With our “if we build it, then they must come” monopoly lost, I began to look at what makes one tech-based service (photo sharing, instant messaging, online shopping, etc.) stand out from another, and what we expect from them… always-on, secure, extraordinary customer service, consistent, lots of freebies, no outages, your friends use, they remember you after your second visit.

Competing for business was not part of our IT DNA. We have a roster of business and infrastructure projects against finite resources.  We plan, deliver, operate, and repeat, one dimensional in scope and approach with a beginning and end.

We needed to shift from implementing projects to launching new services and maintaining existing ones. 

Projects have a “once and done” attitude; lots of hoopla for the go-live kickoff followed by a hyper-care period that then marks the end state. Aside from service requests or incident tickets, it is never to be heard from again. You hope that the next new employee hears about it through osmosis from colleagues or maybe new hire onboarding.

With our new “consumer” mindset, we started applying human-centered design and going live as a service item… consumable, with a defined start and best-before date.  We began to brand and market our services, measure and review consumption, reiterate and eventually retire services.

Each service becomes a living, breathing entity that takes on a life of its own and its’ existence depends on regular direct user feedback. That feedback determines the care and feeding during its lifetime. Ultimately, we give our users more of what they want and less of what they don’t.

With the advent of AI/ML, automation, BOTS, blockchain, etc., the possibilities to shape the user experience are endless.

Like all smart business owners, we never stop marketing, looking for feedback, trying new ideas, analyzing costs, consumption, exploring new ways to grow market share, and evolving our offerings when it supports the business.