Published on the 16/07/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
When asked to rank their enterprise IT department 77 percent of Australians gave them an A or a B, just 2 percent scored an F…
A survey of over 2,500 IT users in five countries including Australia has found that enterprise IT departments are generally considered effective by their end users. However most end users (74 percent of Australian respondents) are likely to first attempt to solve technology problems themselves, and that’s where Google shines.
According to the survey, commissioned by IT service management specialist Landesk, 61 percent of Australia’s DIY brigade turn to Google for tech support, 47 percent use co-workers, and just 36 percent turn to corporate resources such as in house networks or portals.
Andrew Souter, presales manager for Landesk in ANZ, said that the survey revealed that end users were more self-reliant than had first been realised, but he was scathing of the trend to “put IT in the hands of Google.”
“If you are being sent to a wiki, that is not guaranteed to be accurate.”
He also argued that “time spent trying to solve a problem is a productivity killer.” Many Australians are prepared to spend up to a day of their time to try to solve their IT problems before turning to the enterprise IT department, which in 60 percent of cases can solve the problem within a day.
Landesk is understandably using the results of the survey – which was first released in the US a month ago – to help spruik its range of IT Service Management solutions in Australia. The company today launched a new version of its IT Asset Management suite that provides better visibility of technology assets, potentially helping IT departments boost compliance and reduce risk.
When it comes to providing DIY end user support the company is particularly enthusiastic about the Snap IT function, which is slated to be released later this quarter, that will allow end users to take a photo of the screen that is giving them problems, upload it to Landesk which will then attempt to automatically analyse the photo and use that information to fix the problem.
That of course relies on Landesk being entirely up to date with all the technology deployed across the organisation on either enterprise owned or BYOD equipment, and having access to all the patches or updates for them.
Given that 69 percent of Australian survey respondents said that they used their own devices for at least some work functions, that could be a big ask.
