In case you missed it, I recently presented at the 2018 MacAdmins Conference at Penn State University. My talk was, “User Initiated Technology: Why Warby Parker Built a Culture of Self-Service,“, which focused on the growth and development of a self-service culture to better serve both our employees and create a more efficient workflow for our IT team.
For those of you who weren’t able to make it, or those of you interested in revisiting what I had to share, read this three part series:
The Traditional Model of IT Service
For decades, IT departments have provided ‘white-glove’ experiences for their users. I tend to compare these experiences to those that you would expect from a hotel stay: expectations are standardized & service is to the ‘T’. This level of service tends to be the same hotel to hotel, regardless of the locale. These are great for creatures of habit or those who enjoy identical experiences.
My first job out of college was at an MSP, The Lloyd Group. At Lloyd, we excelled at the white-glove model. We deployed standard, monolithic configurations to our clients. We offered on-site service and weekly ‘primary care visits‘ to make sure everything ran as expected. This experience is perfect for large and repeatable deployments, specifically in educational labs, kiosks, or manufacturing facilities. Or anywhere with high turnover.
In a white-glove environment, when the user arrives at work for their first day, their device is setup and ready for them to get started. The philosophy is that the less the user has to prepare or the less time to settle in, the better. For the IT team, this puts an emphasis on managing individual devices. This method was traditionally executed everywhere, regardless of industry.
When deploying devices at Lloyd, all device configurations were granular and particular. We would take steps to manage every device to the same expected state. We’d even go so far as to put icons in particular locations or change toolbars to certain colors.
Because of this, a typical deployment looked something like this:
I’d spend hours on each workstation installing packages and running the defaults command to customize the PLists of those applications. I set up workstations this way to avoid excessive user requests for specific applications and settings after deployment, and it worked. But, that didn’t mean it was an efficient use of my time.
These deployments would take hours and hours. I would even, in some cases, find myself logging in as the user to change a few custom settings before I finally handed off the device to the user.
I found that when deploying machines this way, that this standardization and expectation caused a bit of inertia. Change was often difficult. When a new system was implemented, our users felt like their world was turning upside down. We saw a significant increase in help desk tickets every time we made changes, even minor ones.
Welcome, Self-service
“Interfaces allowing customers to produce services independent of involvement of a direct service employee.” – (Matthew L. Meuter, Amy L. Ostrom, Robert I. Roundtree, & Mary Jo Bitner, 2000)
Self-service is a modern model for IT management that emphasizes managing people over devices.
Self-service isn’t a new concept. In fact, Frank Ulrich created the first self-service gas station as early as 1947. He incentivized and normalized the idea of self-service in a previously white-glove service society with the slogan and promotion, “Save five cents, serve yourself. Why pay more?”
Although he faced great skepticism initially, in his first week of operation the station sold half a million gallons of gas. For context, a typical California gas station now sells about 30,000 gallons a week.
We see self-service all around us.
In 2015, USA Today reported that lost luggage reports decreased 10% at the same time usage of self-service kiosks increased.
On a personal level, I’ve noticed greater accuracy when placing orders at a restaurant kiosk.
Now that self-service has planted itself into the IT space, we have some great options, here are a few:
Accessory Vending
More and more IT departments are providing their users with open access to accessories and peripherals. Deploying a vending machine or a simple shelf, users are allowed to take what they need without requesting the item from behind a locked door. Users can get what they need to be productive, without placing arbitrary barriers.
Zero-touch Deployment
Zero-touch deployment is becoming the norm. Users are allowed to drive the unboxing and setup of their own machine. We see this exemplified by both Microsoft and Apple with Windows Autopilot & Apple’s Device Enrollment Program, respectively. These programs give users the opportunity to personalize their devices before IT can dictate how they can be used. This method also provides users with the perception they have more control over their devices.
Service Catalogs
Service catalogs allow users to trigger automated workflows for common tasks and services that often live in different systems such as:
- Software installation
- Access requests
- Purchasing
- Scheduling
Why Self-service?
Now that you’ve been briefly introduced, what are the benefits of adopting a self-service IT department?
User Empowerment
Studies have shown that autonomy makes employees happier at work, so why shouldn’t there be greater autonomy in technology? With a self-service IT department, your users decide the most productive way to work—not IT. They can work to build a seamless computing experience between work and home, becoming more productive and gaining confidence in their technological abilities. Because of this, they become more adaptable to change; there is no longer inertia to break when making changes.
Your users spend less time with their engineers to solve device problems, and more time with them solving business problems.
Engineer Productivity
Self-service directly leads to a decrease in help desk tickets. Since your users have more control over their machines, they can self-remediate or apply some of the technical skills they’ve learned over the years to their own device issues.
Users become more receptive to education. We’re teaching them how to use some of the same devices they already own, so they are immediately more interested.
This all allows engineers to work on more creative projects, which makes us happier. We can spend less time resetting passwords and more time building solutions to larger and more impactful challenges.
Security
Self-service systems provide additional security whereas IT no longer operates as a dispatcher with all the keys. Self-service and specifically service catalogs, allow business decisions that involve technology systems be offloaded to business owners rather than IT engineers. Here’s how a simple request looks without self-service:
- A Finance Analyst (Julie) needs access to the finance file share
- Julie submits a ticket to the IT team for assistance
- Jon, the IT engineer, emails the Director of Finance (Frank) permission to grant the requested access
- Frank spots Jon in the hallway when returning from lunch and remembering the earlier email lets Jon know that it’s okay to proceed
- Jon proceeds granting access to the finance file share
What could go wrong here? I can think of a few things:
- What if Jon didn’t followup aggressively enough with the Frank?
- What if Jon just decided it was okay to proceed based on job title?
- What if Jon was preoccupied with something else when Frank approached and completely forgot about the interaction?
Now, with self-service:
- A Finance Analyst (Julie) needs access to the finance file share
- The Director of Finance (Frank) receives a request to approve or deny Julie’s access request to the finance file share
- Frank clicks to allow access
- Access is granted and Julie is notified
Notice how with self-service Jon wasn’t even involved? Using the Service Catalog, we’ve mitigated all the potential problems and delays in granting access. Or, the potentially greatest incident where Jon granted access when he wasn’t supposed to. Oops.
An experience like this provides Just-in-time Provisioning, where a user is only granted access to a service when they need it. This catalyzes the adoption of a zero-trust model; user accounts can be initially created with a baseline of minimal access, then the individuals can place requests for additional access from there. This is especially helpful when team members don’t all have uniform access.
Why not?
The Learning Curve
Self-service is hard. Some of your users may have a difficult time adjusting, especially if they’ve worked in a white-glove environment for so long. The white-glove experience ingrains certain expectations that are difficult to shake. The nature of expected systems may even be different. An employee may be surprised to arrive for their first day to a Mac with GSuite instead of a Windows PC with Office. The fact that it’s not pre-setup may be daunting. I’ve seen users who are just not sure where to begin and sit and wait for someone to come help. Some high output teams may even see the time to setup and personalize as wasted time.
Shadow IT
Information-technology systems and solutions built and used inside organizations without explicit organizational approval.
If you are training your users to be in control of their own technology, what’s to prevent them from going way off the beaten path? Your users may feel that they have permission to implement their own systems without proper consultation from the IT team. The IT team inevitably ends up inheriting the administration and management of these systems, causing some significant headaches if it doesn’t fit in with the rest of your infrastructure or standards. Your users may also feel like they have permission to modify technology they shouldn’t; especially technology that lives in a shared space. After modifying, they don’t return it to the expected state which causes confusion and frustration for the next user to use the space.
Cost
Self-service is absolutely more expensive, initially. You need to be prepared to pay for new devices, training, software systems, and engineering time. You may lose out on some bulk pricing for certain peripherals as your user’s workstations become more and more personal and unique.
Why is this happening?
Cultural Shifts
I’m going to make a few inferences here based on personal experience. I believe this shift isn’t unique to IT. I now prefer to stay at an Airbnb over a hotel. I prefer to rent a UHaul and move myself before calling a moving company. If my car is making a strange noise, the first place I head is to YouTube, not a mechanic.
People want to feel in control and now have resources to self-help. This all routes back to technology.
Prevalence of Personal Technology
Your users now have their own technology at home, which wasn’t the case in the early days of computing. Those users learned how to use computers at work rather than at home or school. The percentage of users growing up with these devices continues to increase. These users have developed their own working styles and preferences since they have used technology for so long. Since technology is more accessible, users are more tech savvy so they no longer need a catered experience.
It’s Simpler Now
Building self-service systems used to require significant engineering time since there weren’t many products available to help get you started. Now, there are several products with self-service offerings. Here’s a few: ServiceNow, FreshService, GSuite, Office 365, Jamf, Munki, Okta.
Stay tuned for the second post in the series, User Initiated Technology: Why Warby Parker Built a Culture of Self-Service: Part 2 of 3; where I’ll give you a peak at how we do self-service at Warby Parker.
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