Update From Brett
Looking at IT From a User's Perspective
"If you strive for the moon, maybe you'll get over the fence." - James Wood
I am the last holdout on Rich's leadership team. I am one of only two holdouts among the UTS directors. It's also pretty lonely in the UTS Coordination group, which includes all managers and supervisors. Too lonely, in fact, so now it is finally going to happen.
I am giving up my PC and getting a Mac.
Maybe I'm tired of hearing about IT staff who think it's too hard to switch default UI's in ServiceNow. Maybe I've fielded one too many complaints about what a tyranny it is to be forced to use Exchange. Maybe I can no longer imagine why someone would insist they have a right to have three machines, use Linux (or worse, Solaris), or refuse to join our AD domain. So I decided to impose drastic change on myself, just to remember what it's like to be helpless in the face of something new.
While I wait for my new computer, I am realizing that my new experience as a Mac guy will put me more in touch with our end users than the techie staff I mentioned above. Naturally, I expect to become more handsome and somehow hip as a result of my conversion. But I'm also really looking for that end-user perspective.
I am really proud of the work we have done to create a way for students to get rapid remediation on their wireless experience. I wonder, though, in what other ways are we going to improve on the experience we provide? Change is a reminder that keeping the end-user experience in mind, even if we are far from the end users, is invaluable. That can be a clue for other useful areas to explore.
One example is in our monitoring. It is unacceptable that we cannot measure availability for services the way our customers perceive it. Michael Keown (Enterprise Services) is spearheading a proposed project to overhaul our monitoring and provide more visibility to the customer in ways that are natural and informative to them.
We also have a customer-billing project coming up. On its face, the Billing Services Project will let customers create a bill that looks good and makes sense to them. In the process, we will need to make similar improvements to our ordering and request system. Behind the scenes, we know that four years of effort has not been enough to produce sufficiently accurate voice and data records. Worse, we still struggle to bill new recharge-based services of all types. It takes a ton of internal data keeping to make things simple and accurate for our customers, so I am really counting on automation to streamline the process.
Another end-user experience involves the Web User Interface. Much of what we release does not go through vigorous end-user testing for usability. We need to have better competency in this area. Much is known about web user interface in our industry and but little is practiced here at Emory. I am certain that Steve Jobs would never have put out products that look like Compass or Blackboard.
The drive to create a holistic, insanely great, intuitive, and inviting end-user experience was, and still is, the heart of Steve Jobs' vision of computing. It comes from having 100 good ideas and hearing "that's not good enough" 95 times, but it creates a spirit around Mac ownership that makes people love their machine. Seeing some of that spirit come to life in our own work is something I'm looking forward to even more than my new Mac.
- Brett Coryell, Deputy CIO, OIT