IT Should Make Your Life Easier and Your Business Better

We’re on a mission, getting you home on time!

Over here at ONGC Systems, we’ve long held a philosophy that a healthy work-life balance is the key to a happy and productive life (and yes, our married male members of staff believe the more crucial aspect is a happy wife). It’s an approach we carry through to our clients and it’s also, quite happily, something Microsoft delivers with the concept of the Modern Workplace. More on that in a bit.

The point is that with effective IT systems which feature clever stuff like automation, intelligence and flexibility, you can get more done with less effort. That’s on the one hand. On the other, it means that while at work you can also spend more time doing the valuable stuff that people are good at, and less doing the dull, repetitive stuff that computers gobble up.

Buuuuut…not enough companies have reached this state of being. Instead, most businesses we walk into for the first time have holes in their IT that they simply don’t know about. Those managers who do know about those holes, just aren’t sleeping very well. And some are wondering why they’re paying an IT partner which is nowhere to be seen and with only the woolliest of notions of what their money is buying.

Not only does it not have to be like this, it really shouldn’t be like this. IT has gone from the ‘department of no’ (that is, shutting down potentially risky things) and a necessary evil, to the department of the possible. Technology today is a business enabler. Configured right, it lets your people work when, how and where they want to. And it lets them focus on being people, not drones endlessly filing paperwork or searching for information.

When configured right, too, it doesn’t take a major maintenance overhead. Your IT support provider should be working with you on planning for the future, rather than trapped in endless ‘break/fix’ cycles.

And IT these days should be an investment with defined returns rather than an operational expense. If you’re investing $5,000 on automating a manual process, you should see benefits of $20,000 in annualised returns – and yes, this example is drawn from a real-life deployment.

Intelligent Automation

Now, I’ve mentioned automation and intelligence; these concepts too often get people thinking about Bicentennial Man or iRobot and it’s all a little intimidatingly futuristic.

But automation and intelligence isn’t about anthropomorphic robots taking our jobs. And in fact, ‘artificial intelligence’ generally just really means ‘really good software’ which can do a lot for you. It doesn’t run on some version of C3PO, it runs on your computer, smartphone, a Microsoft Azure data centre or some combination of the three and more. Got a smartphone? You’re using AI every day.

But putting intelligence to work in your business, as opposed to using the services on your mobile, depends on what you can give it, first (and something like 90 percent of businesses today do absolutely nothing with the vast volumes of data they generate and store).

It also depends on knowing what it can do and where. That’s where a savvy service provider who understands your business on the one hand and the great technology available today on the other, is indispensable.

Great use cases we’ve seen including chatbots, automated first line support that learns from user interactions (we’ve developed a solution called Reach that does just this), predictive alerts to situations which require your attention, and self-service HR onboarding and service orchestration which can reduce this process from days to seconds.

We’ve also done a recruitment solution which automatically scores, sorts and qualifies applicants, reducing the time you have to spend going through endless resumes, with only the right ones coming in for an interview.

Delivering solutions like these depends on moving away from the monotonous and one-dimensional ‘break/fix’ routine. It also depends on your service provider elevating discussions around problems, to conversations about enabling your business. Far more valuable to you (and our employees find it a lot more rewarding, too).

This is the Modern Workplace

Better IT which works for your business is really the aggregation of the multiple concepts encompassed in Microsoft’s Modern Workplace. Driven by the cloud, with Bring Your Own Device, built-in security, AI and automation, it’s all about making people more flexible and capable of achieving more with the limited time we have available. It is about breaking the constraints of a desk or system limitations. From anywhere at any time, you can produce and consume information. This aligns perfectly with our own philosophy of achieving a perfect work/life balance. It’s IT that enables you as an individual, and your business as an organisation.