Melhorar a adopção de tecnologia e a produtividade do utilizador com monitorização da utilização do software

[0:04] Lynn: Good day everyone and welcome to the ITAM Open iT webinar: Improve Technology Uptake and User Productivity with Software Usage Metering. My name of course is Lynn Weiss and I’m from ITAM and I’m going to be the moderator today and I’ll take care of any questions or issues that you may have. Before we start I have some logistical items for everybody in the audience. Of course all your lines are muted with the exception of our presenters here. If you have a question that you’d like to ask our speakers just click on the questions box in your GoToWebinar toolbar and type in your query. There will be time hopefully at the end of the session for Q&A but be aware of the fact that if we don’t get to all the questions they will be answered afterwards via email. There will be a link early next week on the ITAM website for anyone to listen in to this pre-recorded event and Tanya has told me that they will make a PDF version of the presentation slides available to anyone that requests it. For everyone also that’s ITAM certified, this webinar counts as two points towards your recertification if you registered through the ITAM website.

[1:25] So to get things moving I want to give you a little bio of Tanya Kristiansen. She is actually a native Californian and relocated to Oslo, Norway and has worked with marketing communications for Open iT for over seven years. She holds a master’s degree from USC in Communications Management and has over 25 years of experience with media production particularly within TV broadcasting. So to start the webinar off I’m going to turn the mic over to Tanya.

[1:57] Tanya: Good day everyone. Yes I’m Tanya Kristiansen and I’m presenting today from Norway which is where our company had its start. As you heard I’m a communications consultant and I’ve been here over seven years. Today I want to explain how different strategies for technology uptake can be supported through software usage metering and reporting. This presentation is based on a joint white paper by the consulting company Endeavor and Open iT, Inc. and is mostly about improving core technology uptake. You can download the white paper from Open iT on our website at www.openit.com and today you’ll see how as you implement new technology that metering software and producing analytical reports can help you improve business results and your communication with top management.

[2:50] Now you’re probably familiar with Forrester Research since they primarily focus on business technology. Recently I was struck by some high-level reports I read, they were so relevant for IT managers. I just want to share their findings with you before we dive into the case study. Almost 2700 business executives surveyed in this Forrester study put growing overall company revenue at the top of their list of priorities. And as an IT asset manager you understand how crucial technology is for delivering value to your company and most business leaders surveyed by Forrester in the study seem to share that perspective. But if you look at the bottom statement on this survey result by Forrester you’ll see that executives answered that IT management understands our business with only a rating of 58%.

[3:53] Oh just a minute. Now excelling at your job may require greater communication with the C-suite to demonstrate that you understand how IT can create more value for the business. We also see that the executive team weighs in heavily on technology investment decisions which makes it especially important for the IT department to communicate needs and priorities clearly to them. Business executives surveyed here are very keen to reduce costs or improve efficiency through technology and they see how improving workforce productivity can actually create more revenue.

[4:33] Now let’s see how the same business leaders rated their IT department’s performance in supporting their top priorities. And here you can see clearly that growing overall revenue is an area perceived as lacking in support of leadership by IT whereas lowering costs is receiving much more support from IT. And even better support is provided by the IT department when it comes to improving workforce productivity, which 11% rated the IT department as taking the lead here and an additional 54% said that IT supported meeting this goal. Now this is a good sign since it should be possible to make a case to leaders how increasing user productivity actually leads to greater revenues. So initiatives to implement new technology uptake in order to increase business productivity and company revenues needs careful planning and measuring progress, and outcomes should be reported to top management to demonstrate exactly how the IT department is supporting their priorities.

[5:45] In a newer survey taken in the second quarter of last year IT managers prioritize improving efficiency above all other initiatives. Balancing effectively between managing IT resources and delivering expected IT services all while keeping within a budget is always difficult. An IT department may be viewed only as a cost center and not as a strategic business strength. The key to success is in developing strong partner relationships between the C-suite and the IT department and having effective processes, technologies, and governance support change in business strategies. IT analytical reports provide for better communication and collaboration between departments. We can see that IT leaders find it important to lower IT operational costs to free up money for new initiatives, perhaps even for introducing new technologies.

[6:43] Now lowering IT operational costs can save a lot of money to reinvest elsewhere. ITAM’s own executive briefing overview states that proactive IT asset management can recover over 25% of the existing IT budget. As an IT asset manager you’ve probably discovered many wasted resources lying idle. IT asset management tools can help you by metering resources, analyzing how they’re used, and finally by enabling optimization of your business technology resources to contribute to the bottom line. Use the hard data collected in reports to see where you can cut costs and where to best reinvest the savings in new technology that boosts user productivity, and see where users need more training and support in order to be more productive. ITAM information is increasingly being used to make more strategic decisions. So as a survey from Gartner shows, as much as 28% of organizations use ITAM data to support financial management and IT strategies.

[8:02] You may have discovered how to use IT asset metering to cut costs but can you demonstrate to leaders how you’re providing business value. You can use ITAM tools to plan for, track, and report to executives about all of these processes in order to demonstrate you’re supporting top business priorities. Today’s focus is mainly on the third business driver, productivity. I’ll discuss how to benefit from usage metering for uptake of new technology to increase productivity instead of hampering it and how to use reports to help these business leaders understand your ITAM efforts and see how they correlate to some of their top business priorities: increased revenues, lowered costs, and increased workforce productivity.

[8:49] New technology often needs to be implemented in order to keep companies at the top of their game but companies that switch to core new business technologies often only consider IT and data management requirements when making the decision to switch. Companies consider factors such as data conversion, license costs, features, functionality, usability, required infrastructure change, and support costs. However the decision to implement new technology that’s core to business performance usually ignores or underestimates the cost of loss of productivity caused by switching. Too little emphasis is placed on the work needed to motivate the organization to change and to move users from a level of incompetency with a new tool to competency and some to an expert level. This lack of emphasis results in low adoption rates, low usage, and higher organizational cost from productivity loss. An effective program will continuously monitor software license usage both to document overall program success metrics and to optimize uptake by making any necessary deployment adoption program changes along the way. How can you know how to improve core technology uptake if you can’t measure how it’s being used.

[10:25] Prepare for multiple views of technology usage. IT usage and uptake can be broken down and represented in many ways. Business leaders need to understand how technology affects productivity. Usage patterns of core technology can be seen through different filters, by business unit or location, by application or application suites and features, and by users or user group, which helps clarify what’s really going on in the organization.

[10:59] There are two commonly used implementation programs: a deployment program and an adoption program. In deployment you require the target user base to use the new technology by a set date. Deployment is most effective in organizations with a strong command and control culture and centralized IT functions. Whereas in adoption each user or organizational unit has an option to use the new technology or not. There may be recommendations from top management to use it but there’s a choice to use it or continue with the current tool. Adoption programs are very common in less autocratic organizations and those with decentralized IT functions.

[11:56] There are some technology implementations that must be deployed and not simply adopted because of their enterprise-wide effects on the organization, like a new finance system or a new human resources management program. A deployment program must have a strong communication of vision by senior management and identify success metrics for the organization. It should also use a deployment team to program manage implementation, development of expert users, training, and support. And you should always reward the organization and individuals in deployment.

[12:42] A user community network is built by the project implementation team but grows through the development of technology champions within the community. The technology champions are trained and their projects are migrated to the new system at the beginning of implementation. Training or support staff will mentor the champions first to ensure the champions have learned to use the technology at a competent or expert level. The champions then will be engaged within the user community network to provide knowledge and expertise from their perspective to others to help them learn the new system.

[13:17] And in an adoption program you still have a strong communication of vision by senior management and you have permission by senior management to use new technology. You have targeted KPIs for successful adoption and a technology adoption team to program manage implementation, user community building, internal marketing, training, and support. The new core business technology has to be sold to each organizational unit or individual. In developing the implementation program the originating purchasing unit will likely form the user community network. Champions might not be identified but will probably self-select and they’ll spread the word about the technology’s value throughout the developing network.

[14:13] Whether the implementation is achieved through deployment or adoption, each strategy can be successful. In both scenarios the perceived value of the necessary functionality added must be identified and communicated throughout the affected organization. Typically adoption programs have slower user adoption rates because of the nature of organic growth. However an effective well-managed adoption program can have user adoption rates that are close to typical deployment programs. And one key component to success for both strategies is in how the user community network is built and managed.

[15:10] So before any core business implementation begins top management must decide which approach best fits the organization’s culture and the requirements of the technology. They have to agree on the success criteria not only for the implementation of the new technology program performance but also for its impact on the organization’s business performance. Metering software applications during an implementation is an extremely effective way to monitor the program’s effectiveness. It can be used to measure program KPIs and most importantly to reduce the loss of productivity when switching core business technologies by giving the implementation team a real-time window with which to manage the program.

[16:07] Continuously monitoring license usage throughout the program, not just at the beginning and the end, will give the team a real-time dashboard on which to see how well the program’s progressing. Using a dashboard the team will be able to see if there’s problems with uptake and they’ll be able to remedy them right away. The dashboard begins to monitor the health of the program. So to illustrate this, a dashboard should profile both the targeted application and for example you can look at trends and usage over time, maximum and average usage compared to what’s available, and the user community that’s deploying or adopting this new application. For example the username sorted by total hours active on the application. This kind of information will give you insights into who are the product champions and late adopters. More graphs can be added to give additional understanding of how an application’s being used by a location or a business unit and the total distribution of usage. How often are licenses being checked out at the same time, you can see that here in this histogram. Through integration with the company’s HR database the username, location, email, and phone number is available with the data to be able to communicate with the user community. Excel dashboards can be created by exporting a report from the analysis web page.

[17:42] Key performance indicators will need to be measured throughout the implementation process. License and application usage metrics are critical to support program performance KPIs and may include measures such as total license usage per product, feature, version, location, active time, total active time, elapsed time, and number of unique users or concurrent license usage, maximum, minimum, or average per product feature version feature name as well as available licenses at any one time. Also trend license usage per application, you can look at target growth rate per product feature etc., and you can compare active versus inactive use per application.

[18:48] Software application metering is effective for actively managing your implementation program. So use it to identify power users, build a strong community, identify users that are reverting to the old system to get their job done, and to reduce productivity loss during the switch. Implementation programs vary a lot in their effectiveness and success. Often new software is offered but there’s little or no process in place to ensure it’s taken up properly into the workflow and the lack of process will likely doom the uptake of the technology. In other organizations an adoption program or a deployment program could be used to implement software but even these programs need to be actively managed with processes that support the changes in behavior, the workflow, infrastructure, and information management. Without a well organized, managed implementation program where progress is measured by monitoring license usage, loss of organizational productivity will likely occur.

[20:03] You can zoom in for further details about who the users are that have used the application, how much active versus inactive time have they spent in this application. Now this is useful again if you want to look at users that could be champions for your core tools, for improving user efficiency, and for increasing the adoption of the new technology throughout. So identify the power users and potential champions. This graph showing the top users of the old version of software was produced when the implementation was being designed. In this particular case it helped to identify which users the implementation team should focus on first to ensure success during the roll out to the new version and to find the champions that would support the rest of the people.

[21:01] Now by monitoring the usage of the new version per user the implementation team can find out quickly if power users of the old version accept the new version or if they’re having problems using it. Actions can be taken to address any issues including technical and behavioral that might arise and the result is a more responsive implementation to the user community. So in this case developing a strong user community helped spread the word about the new tool. The deployment team identified user champions by graphing total hours of usage per user and made resources available to them to further develop their skills. Now another really important way to see who your power users are is by looking at the number of features they’ve used by the hours used to see who’s using the software in the most advanced way.

[22:09] The team also monitored usage of the old and new applications to identify users that were reverting to the old system to get their job done or who needed additional mentoring. The deployment team sought out those users to understand what difficulties they might be having and work to address them. Without monitoring license usage they might not have known if someone was having trouble transitioning to the new technology and so by proactively working with those users experiencing trouble, productivity loss during the switch was dramatically reduced.

[22:49] Now this graph describes a specific scenario of a typical effectively managed adoption program. The company identified a new core business technology and targeted 70 global concurrent users. Since the company’s corporate culture discouraged mandating new technology from a central unit the sponsoring manager chose to pursue an adoption program and gave each business unit permission to use the new technology while at the same time communicating the preference to make the switch to the new tool. An adoption implementation team put together a holistic plan to inform the organization about the benefits and capabilities of the tool and included training, mentoring, and IT infrastructure changes.

[23:43] At point A in the program the pilot project concluded and the first group of users was trained to use the new software application. Included in this first group were a couple of power users of the old technology who indicated a willingness to move to the new application quickly. Now prior to the first training session all data from the first group’s active projects were migrated to the new application so the new users could come back from training and immediately begin working on their own data sets in the new application. Application specialists were present, ready to support and mentor the new users when they returned from training. The user group began to develop and license usage began to grow. At point B the growth rate in usage slowed because of the first champion transferring out of the organization and new champions had to be developed. The upward trajectory of the graph shows the overall effectiveness of the adoption team. At point C there was a required infrastructure upgrade but the user community recovered quickly and 10 months after the initial pilot program began the organization hit its targeted number of licenses.

[25:06] So you need to document your weekly progress. An important adoption and deployment program success factor is ensuring good communication throughout the company, both upward to management, laterally to the new user community, as well as to the organization as a whole. Behavioral changes that accompany the technology changes cascade through the organization when clear expectations are communicated and then actively modeled by senior management. As the deployment or adoption program continues, consistent updates about the program’s progress maintain organizational consciousness about the switch. Continuous license monitoring, usage data, and using dashboards allows for real-time reporting customized to fit the needs and interests of the various parts of the organization. Progress reports can be used on a weekly basis to document progress and to set new targets for training and support.

[26:11] In this graph the uptake of technology is measured by its geographical distribution and the roll out began the week of February 12th in the corporate group but quickly moved to the other regions through April. By midsummer the adoption of the technology had reached its goal of 70 global concurrent licenses. Notice that the sum of licenses used in each region was higher, closer to 80 if you look at the bar charts, but since peak usage in each region didn’t happen at the same time, so the bar chart here shows the conversion of the company’s users from the old version to the new version throughout the year. It’s another clear visual display of the success of the implementation program and the adoption rate. By the end of the third quarter the company had nearly fully embraced the new application.

[27:14] So that concludes the case study part of this. So who is Open iT. Well just briefly here I’ll tell you we are an independent software vendor and our most popular software meters usage of software applications and licenses. And our software also meters hardware for chargeback and optimization and helps with recycling of unused licenses, cost optimization for IT procurement and operations, and increasing user productivity. Here’s a picture of our product architecture. The data is collected by an Open iT client. The kind of data collected depends on what module is installed and what you want to meter. You may have a client on every system or laptop or just on the servers depending on what you want to achieve. If you want to monitor a local program only you’d need a client installed on every PC. For Oracle on the other hand you may only have a few clients for the entire network. So note that the client can work offline as well as online, if it’s working offline it’ll transfer the data to the server once it gets online and the server structures the data for you. So from your favorite browser you can access various reports on the server and we’ve already seen some of these useful reports. So all of Open iT modules have a common data store or data warehouse and a web-based user interface yet they differ depending on the type of data you want to meter, analyze, and optimize.

[29:08] So for today’s topic about improving technology uptake and user productivity we mostly looked at the LicenseAnalyzer™ module which focuses on software license usage. So remember the Forrester study showing only 58% of business executives agreeing that IT management understands our business and remember how highly they rated the need to lower costs, improve efficiency, and drive business innovation through technology. We would like to help you accomplish these things and to be able to communicate positive results clearly to your executives. So please feel free to ask us any questions now or later. You can also contact us through the telephone number on the screen and the email address. Please also visit our website at www.openit.com and schedule a live demo. Thank you very much for your time.

[30:17] Lynn: Thank you Tanya and now we have John with us who is a Solutions Architect with Open iT as well, who is going to help us with any questions we may have. So to start things off the first question that we have here is which license managers are supported by your organization.

[30:49] John: Yeah let me get off mute first, that would probably help, sorry. I needed to find that trigger switch. We support the majority of the license managers that are out there and we also support license managers on request. You know we do support FlexNet, FlexLM, Reprise, Sentinel, IBM LUM, or the new DSLS, LMX, MathLM, Green Hills. So there’s a bunch of them we do support and we also add support for these frequently on customer requests. When a customer comes upon a new license manager they need to support we can work with them to add that in as well.

[31:28] Lynn: Okay. How is your organization unique as compared to other solutions such as one that you just mentioned, FlexNet Manager.

[31:36] John: I think our approach is different in a sense that we’ve always been very focused on metering and reporting, you know optimization of the data we collect and being able to support global enterprises. You know there are some tools out there that are kind of designed for the one off license server or the one location and we have always been focused on the large enterprises. You know we did start out in oil and gas, was some of our first customers there, and so very early we were exposed to very complex environments, large implementations, global implementations. So our software has been built and kind of founded on that principle of supporting a large environment with multiple time zones, multiple users in different regions and locations, and being able to handle not only data collection across all that but also handle the correct reporting of things like concurrency. You know data we see in those environments, I’ve already mentioned oil and gas but of course we’ve also branched that into other industries, you know automotive, aerospace, defense, technology like electronic and mechanical design. So there’s a lot of high-end features that are built into Open iT that you don’t find in some of the more simpler tools that are out there.

[32:56] Lynn: Okay, you brought about another question by answering this one. Can the software application also be applied to more midsize or smaller entities, or those that are distributed but not that large. Will it work in those environments as well.

[33:12] John: Yeah it does. You know the value doesn’t really depend so much on the size of the company. I think for us the value we bring depends on what you’re able to achieve using our software. You may be a 10 person company still having very expensive software or you may have a vendor contract that’s very hard to manage or meter. So the value isn’t so much in the company size as in the complexity and size of what you’re trying to meter and optimize on. So definitely we don’t look at company size so much as a differentiator. That being said we seldom do installations where there’s less than 10 or 20 users, so that’s kind of our lower range of just user counts, and that usually goes hand in hand with at that size your software portfolio tends to be smaller and more manageable anyway.

[34:09] Lynn: Okay. How does your software track licensed and non-licensed application usage.

[34:18] John: It’s a broad topic because it depends on what type of application you’re talking about. There are applications that are simply web based where you can only monitor that on the server through server logs or through the network, through the databases, through maybe the storage area that it stores data in. So that’s a broad question. You know we have several methods of doing that. We have our own agents we can deploy. Our agents will give you the benefit of detecting active versus inactive usage as Tanya has also demonstrated in her webinar, where we can detect not just that the user has the application open but is there any interaction in the application, is there any CPU or IO, mouse or keyboard activity in that specific application. So you may still have a user who’s punching away in Outlook writing a long email, we will still see that there’s zero keyboard activity in this other application we’re monitoring. So that gives you a great level of detail. You may not always want all that detail and then we can use other agents, you know Microsoft SCCM agents for instance, or other data. We can also take things from the network, from the databases as I said. So that depends on what type of application it is and how it’s distributed to the users.

[35:38] Lynn: Okay good. That’s it for the time allotted today. Any additional questions that people may have please refer to the contact details on this final slide. I want to thank everyone for participating in the webinar, especially Tanya and John. Tanya for staying late and John for, well I think you’re here in the US, correct.

[36:02] John: I’m in Houston so it’s perfect timing for me.

[36:06] Lynn: It was good timing. So I want to thank them both for participating today. Remember that there will be an audio recording of this available on the ITAM website hopefully as early as next week. Things are a little delayed right now just because we’re gearing up for the annual conference that we have coming up in October of course. But any additional information, info@openit.com, and this concludes today’s presentation. Thank you.