Use client service intelligence to get proactive

The CIO-level business angle on the latest tech

One recent work day, the CIO of the French division of a large global company scanned a set of reports on his desk. He phoned a coworker and asked, “Have you been having performance problems with your PC?” The surprised employee said yes, the PC had been behaving strangely lately, but he hadn’t reported anything to the help desk about it. The CIO said he would assign a technician to look into the situation so they could get the worker’s PC to perform better.

It’s not everyday you see the IT department take such a proactive stance to make sure that client PCs are a help and not a hindrance to worker productivity. In an ideal world, this would be the norm. Unfortunately, too many IT professionals are forced to work reactively instead of proactively, responding when problems are reported instead of before end users start complaining.

Would you like to work more proactively? Your executive management would like you to. In a 2006 survey published by CFO Magazine, 150 CFOs said their No. 1 IT priority was to “maintain or improve service levels.”

There’s a new tool that delivers the “client service intelligence” to help you become proactive. Just like business intelligence tools can help a company spot odd relationships and hidden trends that are otherwise lost in mounds of raw data, this tool aggregates PC performance data to help IT discover problems before they are reported and trends that asset management tools don’t see. This tool is called Interact ES from Serden Technologies. Interact ES allows the IT department to manage end user assets such as PCs, handhelds and printers from the users’ perspective, not from the network or server perspective. It is a unique user-centric tool focused on end user QoS.

To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

One recent work day, the CIO of the French division of a large global company scanned a set of reports on his desk. He phoned a coworker and asked, “Have you been having performance problems with your PC?” The surprised employee said yes, the PC had been behaving strangely lately, but he hadn’t reported anything to the help desk about it. The CIO said he would assign a technician to look into the situation so they could get the worker’s PC to perform better.

It’s not everyday you see the IT department take such a proactive stance to make sure that client PCs are a help and not a hindrance to worker productivity. In an ideal world, this would be the norm. Unfortunately, too many IT professionals are forced to work reactively instead of proactively, responding when problems are reported instead of before end users start complaining.

Would you like to work more proactively? Your executive management would like you to. In a 2006 survey published by CFO Magazine, 150 CFOs said their No. 1 IT priority was to “maintain or improve service levels.”

There’s a new tool that delivers the “client service intelligence” to help you become proactive. Just like business intelligence tools can help a company spot odd relationships and hidden trends that are otherwise lost in mounds of raw data, this tool aggregates PC performance data to help IT discover problems before they are reported and trends that asset management tools don’t see. This tool is called Interact ES from Serden Technologies. Interact ES allows the IT department to manage end user assets such as PCs, handhelds and printers from the users’ perspective, not from the network or server perspective. It is a unique user-centric tool focused on end user QoS.

Interact ES is for Microsoft Windows-based environments. The solution uses a silent agent on the desktop to gather the normal performance information. What makes Interact ES unique is its ability to correlate the gathered data and analyze trends, provide alerts about problems before they occur, and focus on business service-level agreements (SLA) and cost management. Interact ES aggregates and correlates performance data in a central “knowledge database,” where management reports provide the visualization of trends and investment priorities according to actual usage and QoS.

Let’s look at a few examples of how the aforementioned CIO (whose company policy prohibits from us naming his employer) uses the desktop intelligence derived from Interact ES.

When he became CIO about a year ago, his department was receiving a lot of complaints from end users about their PCs. The company had its systems integrator install Interact ES on 100 PCs as a proof of concept. The first test of the Serden product was to understand why the users’ laptops were running slowly, specifically in running Lotus Notes. The SLA said it should take 3 to 4 seconds to open Notes; many users experienced a much longer access time. Data from Interact identified all the users whose machines exceeded the SLA. Further analysis showed the common link among these PCs: a quirk in the Notes configuration. This was readily visible when the performance data was aggregated and viewed via a management report.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.