[Part of The 9 Most Common Issues in End-User IT Affecting Digital Employee Experience video series]
Transcript of the video:
If you want to improve your end-user IT, in this video we talk about three of the most common maintenance issues that you should be looking out for.
A well-working PC is easier to manage by the IT team while providing a better employee experience with less support effort.
A proactive and efficient IT team understands all aspects of the health of their computer environment and is data driven and knows which users and devices need prioritizing for fixes and upgrades.
The alternative to this is working in the dark, reactively firefighting issues as they get reported by end-users normally after a significant amount of disruption has already been experienced, which can be demoralizing for all involved.
So what are the three most common issues affecting IT maintenance and support?
Slow computer start-up times
Start-up times can get slower over time and users seldom notice and let It know about this issue. They often just start to work around the problem. For example they leave their computers on all the time. This is really not ideal as it makes important updates more difficult and wastes energy, which again is not good with the bills that we're incurring right now.
Those minutes that employees spend waiting for their computers to start up end up costing the organisation a lot of money.
Just do the maths: simply multiply the number of minutes by the number of employees.
An interesting study to refer to you here is the Robert Half Technology survey a few years ago which found that workers lose on average 22 minutes a day due to tech issues.
This adds up to over two full weeks of lost work per year per employee!
If your company has 500 employees, that's a staggering 1000 weeks of lost productivity coming in at a significant cost for the company.
The industry standard regards less than 15 seconds as good in terms of startup times and more than 45 as bad. However, you should be striving to achieve startup times of under 10 seconds, which would indicate a modern, up-to-date and efficient PC.
Therefore, it is wise for IT to monitor startup times and analyse if there are ways to speed things up.
I was recently talking with an IT leader who told me that it was not that long ago that he remembers that it took around 30 minutes for his end-users' computers to start up, which meant they all had to come in at 8:30 just so they could be ready in time for a 9:00 a.m. start.
Once they fixed this issue, the employees were coming in at five to nine, much more respectable, which had a really big impact on boosting their morale at work.
Windows 10/11 versions and builds including end-of-life versions in use
A major surprise for us when undertaking our analysis of over 1000 customer environments was that nearly a third of desktops were using end-of-life OS versions and 10% of laptops were using end-of-life OS versions.
The more versions you have in your environment, the more difficult it is to make corrective changes. Some OS versions might have bugs or security issues that are fixed in later versions. Some might even have serious vulnerabilities.
It can also make it hard to diagnose problems happening with the software running on these OS versions due to a potential incompatibility or conflict due to the specific OS versions on the machine, for example.
If you want to improve your end-user environment and make it more secure, easier to manage, one key task is to reduce the number of OS versions in your environment. Assess what versions and batches are actually installed. Many It management tools may report that an update or batch has been installed, when in fact it is indeed being pushed, but never actually successfully installed on that computer.
The majority of our customers are surprised by how much the actual situation differs from what they expect.
Software version sprawl including unapproved software in use
Having too many software versions is a common issue, yet easy to fix.
As in the case of OS versions, many versions of the same software creates compatibility issues, makes your environment less secure, more prone to problems, and harder to manage.
• There are versions that have known vulnerabilities or end-of-life which should not be in use.
• Another issue is that there may be software that users have installed on their own which should not be installed at all.
• You will likely find opportunities to reduce the number of similar software titles you're using that are often doing the same thing, offering the same solution by deciding on just one to use across the company, making your environment more manageable and easier to support and maintain.
A screenshot from Applixure in a sample of shared computer environment data shows that there are 18 software with over 15 versions in use, with one product having a staggering 42 versions. Also note that in the same sample there are 48 unapproved software in use that need to be reviewed and dealt with to help make IT management easier and more secure.
Are you interested in seeing how YOUR computer environment stacks up? Schedule your complimentary DEX Assessment where we'll take a look at the state of your computer environment. 👇
