6 Benefits of this Viable Digital Transformation Strategy

Effective Digital Transformation for Your Hybrid Workforce

Optimizing technology for your hybrid workforce is like transforming from a caterpillar to a butterfly. Progressing to modern workplace technology is akin to developing wings; it empowers your workforce with the freedom to work productively from anywhere.

Just like metamorphosis, digital transformation can be an arduous process. It should be carefully planned and executed — partnering with an experienced managed services provider (MSP) can help.

The Benefits of DaaS

For a cost-effective, efficient digital transformation initiative, you may want to look at Desktop as a Service (DaaS). It’s a cloud computing model in which a third party, such as a managed services provider (MSP), hosts and manages the virtual desktop environment, including the operating system, applications, and data. With DaaS, users can access their virtual desktops remotely from anywhere.

DaaS offers an efficient, flexible way to deliver desktop computing resources that will provide your users with an accessible, secure, and consistent desktop experience, all while reducing infrastructural management.

Key benefits of DaaS include:

• Cost Savings – DaaS can help you implement “bring your own device” strategies and extend the lifespan of your older devices by leveraging the processing power of virtual desktops. Also, it reduces the upfront costs of expensive hardware because the DaaS provider hosts and manages the virtual infrastructure. A predictable, consumption-based subscription model moves costs from capital to operating expenditures.
• Security – It improves security by centralizing applications and data in a controlled environment. Storage in the cloud reduces the risk of bad actors accessing sensitive information, even if a device has been lost or stolen.
• Flexibility & Scalability – DaaS provides employees the flexibility to access their work on multiple devices, such as a desktop, laptop, or tablet, from any location. Companies can quickly add or remove virtual desktops based on current needs — no need for manual hardware provisioning.
• Centralized Management – With DaaS, everything can be centralized, even security, making it easier for your IT to maintain control and secure data.
• Accessibility – Your virtual desktops can be accessed from any device.
• Access to Advanced Features – DaaS providers often offer additional capabilities and features that might be complex or expensive if implemented in an on-premises environment.  

Now that you know the benefits of DaaS, it’s imperative that you know who can help transform your organization from end to end.  

DaaS and Your Digital Transformation Journey

Wanting your organization to evolve and do it in an efficient and cost-effective way is entirely understandable. We understand that in order to make this big move seamless for your organization and employees, it is better to do it with a managed service provider.

Let our experts help. By choosing Compucom as your MSP, we believe you’ll be off to a great start dis DaaS and with your digital transformation initiatives. 

The post Desktop as a Service: Freedom and Flexibility for Your Workforce appeared first on Compucom.

Emma Mak • Staff Writer

Off the top of your head, which corporations do you consider disruptors? Uber, Tesla, Domino’s Pizza, and Netflix? These are just some of the biggest, and it’s no coincidence that each of these market giants counts digital transformation as a prime factor in their dominance.

Digital transformation drives businesses to evolve, building resilience and competitiveness in a fast-paced world. A McKinsey study found that organizations embracing it were 26% more profitable than their peers.

But effectively strategizing for reduced costs, improved operations, and greater business flexibility and agility means acknowledging a hard truth: digital transformation can be challenging to achieve, and typical success rates hover at a dismal 30% or less. 

Digital Transformation Risks

Where can digital transformation go wrong? Some of the risks include:

• High costs: digital transformation can be expensive
• Resistance to change: some employees may resist changes to their work processes or new technologies
• Skills gaps: companies may struggle to find employees with the necessary skills to implement digital transformation

Many companies avoid these pitfalls and increase their odds of ending up in the winner’s circle by taking advantage of the low-hanging fruit of digital transformation. Device as a Service (DaaS) is a prime example of a service that checks all the right boxes.

Avoiding the Pitfalls by Using DaaS

DaaS is a per-device, consumption-based subscription model providing businesses with the latest laptops, desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Each device comes conveniently preconfigured and customized with productivity and security applications and includes value-added services such as personalized support.

By outsourcing hardware, software, and device management to a managed services provider (MSP), organizations can be more flexible, scaling devices up or down as needed and shifting costs to operating expenses, making budgeting for the years ahead much easier.

DaaS Helps Organizations Save Money

Many digital transformation initiatives require significant upfront investment before any long-term benefits and cost savings are realized. But DaaS allows for the reduction of capital expenditures out of the gate by avoiding the purchase and ownership of IT assets.

And there are further financial benefits. Because of the services it includes, DaaS decreases the time and resources needed to manage devices. Additionally, efficiencies are gained through reduced over-provisioning or under-utilization of IT resources.

Get Help Addressing Employee Resistance to Change

A well-established provider will have long-term partnerships with leading vendors, giving users access to familiar and user-friendly technology they love. The customizable nature of DaaS solutions enables the right fit to meet the needs and preferences of employees.

Finally, a provider can bring extensive experience in how to effectively communicate the benefits and rationale of transformation initiatives, increasing company-wide buy-in.

Fill Your Skill Gaps When Implementing DaaS

Partner with a DaaS provider who has the subject matter experts and broad-ranging experience to make your digital transformation efforts a success. From planning and forecasting through buying, deploying, asset tracking, support, and retirement of assets, they can provide the skill sets needed.

Device as a Service (DaaS) — A Viable Digital Transformation Strategy

There might be smaller-scale initiatives to start with, but to increase buy-in for their full digital-transformation journey, companies should consider the easy success and numerous benefits of DaaS.

Not only will DaaS decrease capital spending, simplify IT management, and reduce related costs, but it will make employees happy — they get the current devices they actually want, with built-in refresh cycles and great support.

An MSP with deep vendor relationships and extensive digital transformation experience make a great partner for implementing DaaS. They can help ensure your initiatives skirt the typical pitfalls.

Compucom: Your Go-To Source For All Things IT

One of the biggest reasons transformation efforts fail is a company’s lack of understanding and experience to implement such transformations successfully.

Our talented Professional Services consultants can help you realize your digital transformation objectives while achieving ROI.

We want to become your trusted advisor and go-to source for all things IT: providing product solutions, transformative professional services, user-centric managed services, and IT staffing.

The post Avoid Digital Transformation Pitfalls with Device as a Service (DaaS) appeared first on Compucom.

Try it for the cost savings, stay for the better employee experience

To say the last few years have taught business leaders to expect the unexpected is an understatement.

A CIO’s Superpower: Strategic Cost Cutting

The Economist used the word “permacrisis” to describe the current world outlook. And what can be counted on, such as a likely recession throughout 2023, is generally not positive. In such times, managing uncertainty with smart prioritization for IT spending is a CIO’s superpower.

While the recession in the U.S. will continue to be tempered by a strong labor market and strong household savings, the economic outlook makes cutting costs in IT advisable. But cut in the wrong area, and you could impact your company’s resilience and future growth. So, what should you consider?

Prioritize Good Employee Experiences for Hybrid and Remote Workers

First, offering and supporting hybrid and remote work models gives companies an advantage. That’s in no small part due to another continuing trend: workers, for now, hold the power to demand the work-life balance that remote and hybrid work promises. With America’s labor shortage showing no signs of easing, smart companies will prioritize Employee Experience to keep employees happy and productive; this includes ensuring their day-to-day interactions with technology are optimized.

Other worthwhile priorities include a well-supported distributed workplace, lowered IT costs, and good employee experience to keep your existing workforce (which you may be struggling to fill) as productive as possible.

These are tall orders. Fortunately, the right technology, services, and support can help on all these fronts. And speaking of the ongoing talent shortage, especially in IT roles, CIOs might want to give overloaded IT departments a hand and partner with a Managed Services Provider to reach these goals.

How DaaS Cuts Costs While Elevating Employee Experience

One such solution an MSP offers is Device as a Service (DaaS). DaaS is a subscription model for leasing devices from a service provider rather than purchasing them outright. More than just providing hardware such as laptop computers, smartphones, and tablets for your employees, it offers a comprehensive package of services included in the leasing price for device management, including software, security, and maintenance.

The following list describes some of the benefits of DaaS through Compucom, a trusted MSP:

• Cost savings: DaaS can help your enterprise reduce upfront costs, as you don’t need to purchase the devices outright. Additionally, the subscription includes cost-effective services for device management and maintenance, further reducing costs
  
• Device choice: Users get access to current popular devices from Compucom’s partners, such as Apple®, Intel®, Dell®, HP®, and Lenovo®, and the contract includes a proactive device refresh process
  
• Better employee experience: Not only do employees get to use devices they love, they’ll also appreciate the services that can be included, such as seamless onboarding with ready-now devices and personalized support
  
• Simplified device management: By leasing devices through Compucom, you can streamline the procurement, deployment, and ongoing management of employees’ devices. We provide a single point of contact for all device-related issues, which reduces the administrative burden on your IT department
  
• Scalability: As your enterprise evolves its device needs may also change. With DaaS, you can easily scale your device fleet up or down to meet changing business needs, without having to worry about disposing of or repurposing outdated devices
  
• Enhanced security: Daas includes advanced security solutions for device management, such as remote wipe capabilities and device tracking, helping your enterprise ensure devices and data are secure
  
• Predictable costs: DaaS uses a fixed monthly subscription fee, which can help you more effectively budget your technology expenses
  
• Responsible and secure asset disposal: In-house wiping of sensitive data and disposal of assets in accordance with environmentally responsible requirements

Overall, DaaS can help you simplify device management, reduce costs, and enhance security, making it an attractive option for CIOs navigating uncertainty.

Cut Costs but Keep Your Company Resilient

When considering where to cut costs, it’s vital to evaluate the company’s overall business strategy and goals to identify which components of IT are essential for the company’s growth and success.

Investing in employee experience is a clear winner. Technology and services that keep employees productive and happy will contribute to the company’s success across the board.

Outsourcing to a managed service provider, such as Compucom, gets you managed services, such as DaaS, that are cost-effective and designed around the employee experience. Partnering with us will get you services that help cut costs, improve efficiency, and lighten the burden on your IT team — keeping you resilient and thriving in challenging times.

The post Save Money and More with Device as a Service appeared first on Compucom.

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With the urgency of current healthcare worker shortages, strategies for attracting and retaining top talent are front of mind for organizational leaders. This puts Employee Experience (EX) — the employee’s overall impression of an organization based on all the interactions they have from onboarding to offboarding — in the spotlight.

Because such tasks as managing patient data, tracking treatment plans, scheduling appointments, and using telemedicine and barcode medication administration systems can make up a sizable percentage of a healthcare worker’s day, high-performing technology is fundamental to good employee experience.

User-Centric Services: Device Choice and Personalized Tech Support

Device as a Service (DaaS): A Budget-Conscious Way to Provide Great Devices

Device as a Service (DaaS) is a leasing model that provides laptops, tablets, and smartphones bundled with a complete set of features and services covering the entire lifecycle of the device into a single, per-device monthly contract. It’s a scalable solution that allows you to easily shrink or grow your fleet of devices as needed without incurring significant upfront costs.

The benefits to healthcare employee experience include:

• Access to the latest technology
  For the best patient care, hospital staff needs up-to-date equipment that works efficiently. Device offerings are on a regular refresh cycle (typically three years), ensuring access to current devices without incurring additional costs

• Simplified device management
  Device management, maintenance, security, and support can be part of the DaaS package, freeing your staff from time-consuming tasks such as software updates, security patches, and troubleshooting

Personalized Technology Support Services: Help to Suit Each Healthcare Worker and Situation

Health information technologies are implicated as a contributing factor to clinician burnout. With the pressures and fatigue that clinicians face as part of the job, it’s critical to ensure that, should they run into technical issues, they always have access to high-quality support in the way that suits them and the situation best.

Look for personalized support services to provide proactive incident resolution with multi-channel engagement through voice (with a courtesy call-back feature), text, email, digital assistance (which unifies AI chat and live agent chat), and a digital engagement platform for self-help and self-service.

Experience Management Across All IT Services

Continuous Improvement of Employee Experience

Experience Management (XM) is a process for measuring, managing, and improving employee experience. Sources of important data such as endpoint telemetry (including application, operating system, and device data), service metrics (availability, use rate, and reliability data), event sensors, targeted employee surveys, and user-sentiment analysis are used to generate performance indicators.

Insights are developed from the collected data using Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML). Then actionable insights are generated, either automatically or by experienced analysts.

Experience Management (XM) is a Game Changer

Using Experience Management (XM) processes helps determine the right improvements and actions to take across a breadth of services. For example:

• Programmed automated responses, such as self-heal actions triggered by sensor events
• Knowledgebase content updates or improved chat scripts
• Empowering service desk agents with one-click automation to resolve a common issue on endpoint devices

XM is a game changer for our customers. We can now provide them with a view into their employees’ sentiments, burnout, and frustration and enable insight into how best to fix potential pain points, sometimes before the user is even aware of an issue.

Compucom: The Right Partner for Healthcare Technology

With the significantly higher rates of burnout and stress in healthcare, your staff shouldn’t have to wait on technology and IT services that don’t perform well; their focus should be achieving a reasonable work-life balance and caring for patients.

Compucom has strong relationships with popular OEMs for you to choose from, such as HP®, Lenovo®, Intel®, Dell®, and Apple®. We also design all our services around EX.

Our focus is creating ideal technology experiences for end users, proactively keeping them connected, productive, and secure. Our solutions minimize technical frustrations and barriers to productivity while giving a nod to today’s workers’ expectations that are heavily influenced by their consumer experiences.

The post 3 Ways Technology Can Ease Pressure on Healthcare Workers appeared first on Compucom.

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For companies across industries, worker expectations have grown exponentially. Many who enjoy the flexibility of remote and hybrid work expect seamless technology and tools. Meanwhile, their peers in-office also expect efficient technology, processes, and support.  

“Productivity, minimizing downtime, and enabling employees to be able to access things when they need it and how they need is really paramount.”

Says Troy Baldwin, product management director at CompuCom. “It’s always been important, but Covid accelerated the need.” 

In this new norm of an increasingly distributed workforce, it’s critical for enterprises to get the employee experience right. Yet many companies struggle with employee engagement, satisfaction, and turnover due in part to outdated technology or persistent roadblocks to change.  

With the right solutions and technology, however, enterprises can ensure their workers are engaged and happy, and have experiences that are productive, connected, secure, and seamless. Ultimately, happy workers lead to better outcomes for companies.  

The Challenges

Workers across sectors continue to have abundant choices in the job market as the Great Resignation continues, while employee expectations have drastically shifted. 

Some 50% of respondents to a Gartner survey said the pandemic changed their expectations for their employer. When employees talk about their on-the-job frustrations, outdated and hard-to-use technology almost always tops the list.  

Employees want their work devices and tools to be modern, up-to-date, compliant, secure, and hassle-free.And workers want this seamless experience from day one. They expect a smooth and hassle-free onboarding process that gets them up to speed and working right away. When their equipment breaks or malfunctions, they need an immediate fix, and for outdated equipment to be replaced without effort on their end or long wait times. 

“From day one, people have to have the tools to at least start to function—a computer, email,” Baldwin says. “Folks are leaving because they didn’t have the tools they needed or the tools they wanted.” 

For companies that fail to address a poor employee experience, there are often significant consequences. Enterprises may suffer from the high cost of continuously having to recruit and onboard new staff. 

Replacing staff members also isn’t a quick or easy task. By some estimates, the average time to hire last about 43 days, and for some, it’s much longer. That’s time that could be better spent creating new, engaging experiences for current employees. 

On the flip side, there’s a significant upside and bottom-line impact to having engaged, productive, and happy employees. Employees that are satisfied with their work help maintain customer relationships, improve business outcomes, and offer better customer experiences.  

Despite how critical seamless technology and processes are for employees, however, IT talent comes at a premium these days. It’s difficult for IT departments to keep up with their day-to-day requirements, let alone deliver a seamless employee experience.  

The Solution

The good news is that managed services can simplify hardware refreshes and remote monitoring, taking some of the burden off IT. 

Compucom’s Modern Endpoint Management for the Modern Age helps companies shift from an office-centric approach to a work-from-anywhere model. It’s a concierge-style single source for provisioning, device management, and operational support.  Baldwin went on to say:

“When you package services together, companies have a much better experience. It enables the full breadth and understanding of the environment that’s very difficult for customers to do independently.” 

Using the service, companies can seamlessly manage devices’ complete life cycle, from procurement to end-of-life when devices are retired, resold, or replaced. The service makes remote monitoring, fixing, and managing all employee devices easy, including Windows, macOS, mobile, and BYO devices.  

Employees can access files and apps from anywhere, while security is ensured regardless of the multiple work locations. Onboarding becomes seamless, too, with distribution to new employees of pre-equipped devices containing applications and tools.  

As part of the holistic solution, Compucom has a long-standing partnership with Intel on the vPro platform, which allows for remote access of machines so repairs can be performed at any time.  

By tapping into the vPRO platform, enterprises lower maintenance costs when technicians don’t have to repair on-site or equipment doesn’t need to be sent in for repair. Still, dispatch support can be sent to a worker’s residence when necessary and a replacement device readily provided during repair to minimize downtime. 

Analytics tools and automation are a key part of the solution. If an event or an issue occurs on an employee’s device, an automation can be proactively kicked off to resolve the problem before the user experiences an impact. 

“We’re also constantly learning and constantly collecting all this telemetry data to understand where there’s opportunities for automation,” Baldwin says. 

Sustainability Savings

The journey to net zero is also furthered when rolling out gas-powered, CO2-emitting service vehicles for service becomes less necessary. What’s more, companies can also save energy with optimized power state management, turning devices on and off remotely to match usage patterns, reducing unneeded energy consumption and lowering utility costs.  

Compucom’s Device as-a-Service component includes flexible equipment leasing, “zero touch” remote device configuration, and convenient repair, refurbishment, and IT Asset Disposition services.Companies that have embraced the solution have: 

• Reduced support needs by up to 40%
• Lowered maintenance costs
• Improved staff productivity  
• Streamlined employee onboarding by reducing device setup time by up to 90%
• Created a better overall user experience  

One large financial company that ultimately approached Compucom for help heard from employees that log-in start-up times were taking 20-30 minutes each morning. 

“That’s a huge productivity loss for employees and the organization,” Baldwin says. “We’re at a place now where folks are not going to put up with that.”  

Compucom put analytics tools in place for the financial company to collect data to evaluate start-up times. They found the delayed start-up claims were true. Highly skilled employees were experiencing some of the largest productivity losses. 

Because of the analysis, the company implemented a holistic solution that included adjusting scripts and replacing aged-out equipment. The solution ultimately drastically improved start-up times and resulted in enhanced employee productivity.  

The Bottom Line

In today’s distributed workplace, where employees have more choice than ever when it comes to employers, it’s clear that a seamless experience with technology is no longer a nice to have—it’s mission critical. 

Companies that want to retain staff and ultimately provide the best possible service to customers will benefit from a managed service like Compucom’s Modern Endpoint Management for the Modern Age.

Learn more about Intel vPRO here.

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