New Software Adoption Made Easy
Do you remember your first day in your current role, or perhaps a previous employment where that first day was particularly head-spinning? With workplaces being ever more reliant on electronic communication and especially amongst a hybrid / Work From Home (WFH) model, onboarding to a new job can be a much more difficult exercise than when everyone worked in the same building. If you needed to ask someone without bothering the boss, you’d get up from your desk, walk to the appropriate department and ask for help on your specific problem.
Nowadays you might have to send about 15 messages on Slack, Teams, also by email and maybe ‘hop on a zoom call’ to find out your employee number or the location of the washrooms!
A DAP to virtually hold your hand
If that wasn’t bad enough, someone has to metaphorically hold your hand whilst you adopt to any new software packages that you need to learn. And that’s the last thing you need, a painful slow pickup of the company’s software systems at the same time as everything else going on. Fortunately, AI-driven virtual hand-holding assistance is available through a Digital Adoption Platform, known as a DAP. One such platform is called WalkMe.
A DAP is a ‘learning layer’ independent from, but allied to, any software package where it’s applied. The beauty of it being driven by artificial intelligence is that it can personalize its output on a per-user basis. Accordingly, if an employee is a particularly slow learner, they might make the same mistake over and over again at the same steps in their workflow. This being the case, a DAP can prompt the user BEFORE the mistake is made, as its predictive analytics know when the user is likely to make the error. But once the employee learns not to make those particular errors, the DAP will stop prompting where assistance is no longer necessary. In effect, having a DAP allied to an employee software package is like having a friendly, knowledgeable and experienced co-worker watching over your shoulder, offering a brief tasteful glimpse of an assistance tooltip only when it’s required, without you even having to ask.
A DAP can save valuable resources
When Human Resources (HR) professionals and C-suite executives use Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, they might well stop to think of all the funds that can be saved and potential increase in bottom line profit from enabling employees to keep up to speed with software changes in the workplace. After all, time is money and poor productivity due to simple human error-driven software input mistakes can easily be avoided with a DAP.
Enterprise Resource Planning is more important than many managers realize. A careful examination of how your employees perform, both when working from home or from the office is essential, and a DAP can also help with this, because it offers a management dashboard that gives a 360-degree view of an organization’s global IT competence levels. This knowledge gap analysis is an essential part of cost savings when it comes to allocation of resources for IT training and helpdesk investment. Using a DAP wisely could well cut those expenses whilst improving employee productivity.
WFH security and permissions
Unfortunately, an extra complication that causes more headaches for HR and in-house IT training personnel is the vastly increased prevalence of people using their own devices from home to access company networks etc. It’s one thing having a DAP running on a company server so that it is accessible from designated workstations, but what about the hybrid workers who are accessing their screens from the office on Mondays and Tuesdays, but from their MacBooks on their kitchen tables for the rest of the week? This WFH / own device conundrum has gotten so problematic that one company, Mosyle have a new Apple Unified Platform that can offer antivirus and antimalware support for shared devices in the home. Their permissions management solution has turned out to be so successful that they have just raised $196 million in a Series B funding deal. Mosyle can also give managers remote wipe and lock tools with privileged account management. After all, you don’t want your accounts clerk’s teenaged eco-warrior son bringing down the accounts of a multi-million dollar utilities company when his mother is working from home! The even better news is that a DAP can run in the cloud as happily as alongside an internal company network, so hybrid working with DAP support can always be made available.
IT managers need to know how employees perform
Finally, there’s a flip side to the coin about onboarding new employees efficiently and uniformly, especially more senior managers. It’s almost a philosophical question, but if you’ve hired people to manage your business, then when you onboard them, you insist that they stick to the status quo, how are they going to make an impact on your organization? If you hired a new IT manager for their questioning nature and their policy of giving employees more autonomy, but then don’t allow that autonomy to happen, there’s little point in having employed that new person in the first place.
Fortunately, having a DAP dashboard at an IT manager’s fingertips allows them to make these decisions in a much more informed context, and that has to be a win/win for employees and bosses alike.
