We’ve been talking about Service in IT for a long time. More recently, concepts such as Service Design, the Service Experience, and even Human-centered Design have made some headway into the IT mind space.
But while we’ve given these topics some lip-service, most organizations have paid little attention—and devoted few resources—to embracing experience design and embedding into the development and operational culture.
The recent pandemic, however, has brought some emerging trends to the forefront of IT’s reality and accelerated their impact—and in so doing, may finally make experience design a critical path item for enterprise IT organizations.
3 Accelerating (and Colliding) Trends
The first of these accelerating trends is the remote work or work from home (WFH) movement. The ability and desire to enable workers to work from home — or wherever they chose—has been building slowly for years in a series of fits and starts.
And then COVID-19 hit.
When it did, it kicked off what some have called the greatest WFH experiment the world has ever seen. We are clearly in our WFH moment. A recent Cherwell study found that COVID-19 created a 74 percent increase in remote work—anyone surprised?
The second trend may be a bit more unexpected: a pandemic-induced increase in automation. A recent study by Inference Solutions found that 64 percent of organizations expect to increase investments in automation technologyover the coming year due to COVID-19. It seems that organizations are increasingly turning to automation to help them cope with their rapidly changing circumstances and uncertainty.
But it’s the third trend that may be most significant.
As automation increases, it puts corresponding pressure on experiential execution. (We’ve all had those horrible experiences of automation gone wrong.)
Another Cherwell study found that well-integrated processes (a critical part of the experience) resulted in higher productivity, better collaboration, and an improved employee experience. Unfortunately, the same study also showed that those processes and experiences are not well integrated in most organizations—and employees and customers are suffering as a result.
The net-net as these three trends accelerate and intersect is that there is a whole lot of change coming to the enterprise IT landscape. These changes will demand that IT leaders start redesigning and reimagining the customer and employee experiences they deliver to accommodate these new work environments, increased automation, and the need for high levels of integration. And they’re going to need to do it fast.
Read the full article on the Cherwell blog.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. At the time of this writing, Cherwell is an Intellyx client. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper. Photo by Amy-Leigh Barnard.
