Support’s Bright Future - Black Friday, White Christmas and Red Hot Gadgets

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Early signs, from the day that US retailers call Black Friday, are that this year will see bumper sales of hot gadgets such as the iPad, Kindle Fire and Galaxy S. Some of these devices will inevitably stay on the shelf for most of 2012, unappreciated and under-used. Importantly though, many will be brought to work.

For those of us supporting enterprise applications, the amazing usability of these products will have several knock-on effects as the world of consumerism becomes a growing part of the world of enterprise IT. Sometimes our role is not to ask why, our role is just to support.

Quite understandably, many of those who are blown away with the functionality of their smartphones and tablets will also expect their IT departments to bring a new level of sophistication to the IT services they receive at work. This demand inevitably creates pressure on IT departments to supply even more seamless user experiences, more self-solve and less ‘friction’’ in their interactions with users. Most IT departments however need to do so without the carefree attitude to budgeting of many holiday happy shoppers.

On the positive side, IT consumerization is driving a lot of powerful change in IT support. The need to focus intently on user experience, the need to support mobile applications across a plethora of device platforms is the ‘new normal’. Most of all there is a lasting dissatisfaction with ‘business as usual’. At HP Software support, we are taking these lessons to heart.

Our Software Support Online (SSO) portal now means all you need is web-browser to access our systems. There is still work to do on access across the fast-changing landscape of mobile devices and we are paying a great deal of notice to the likely winners of the Bring Your Own Device [to work] race.

In reality though, this is nothing new for HP’s Software support teams, who for decades have built up expertise in the issues of supporting HP’s growing stable of best-of-breed enterprise software and whose remit increasingly encompasses third party software as well as our own. Our Premier Software teams today include certified professionals in the leading enterprise software platforms and across a wide range of hardware. One of the advantages of HP’s size is exactly the breadth of knowledge available from one place.

This holiday season is therefore of special interest to HP Software Support as consumers and enterprise customers push harder for slick interactions served on more technology platforms than ever before. Those of us who appreciate the innovation which technology brings to organizations, have to accept and embrace change. In fact we should welcome all the challenges brought by next generation technologies, whether they come out of the lab, were born in the games industry or even out of the playground.

We have to truly understand these changes in user expectations and use them as the reason to make our support organizations more successful. The good news is that as user expectations change, so do our opportunities to exceed them. That is the real lesson of the current boom in IT consumerization.