We live in a time when IT is essential to the success of your business. However, when you look at IT, it is often a very complicated matter. And that is where many companies give up. Then simplicity comes into play.
You can remove the complexity that IT entails by adopting the simplicity mindset.
Simplicity in IT is nothing more than:
- Standardization
- Uniformity
And the beginning starts with forming profiles of the employees within your company. Who are they, what are the needs, and what kind of work do they do?
Step 1: creating personas
Profiling your employees starts by drawing up personas. Personas are short descriptions via a template in which you describe who a certain kind of someone is within your company. Within such a persona, you write what a person is like, his behaviour, demographic information, etc. Based on these types of profiles, you can then determine what the needs are. That way, you can get a better idea of what solutions you need within your company. Plus, you also get a rough idea of which standard solutions might be suitable.
Of course, the question is, how many personas do you have to create to make it somewhat representative? I usually consider 3 to 5.
Step 2: Budget
Just give everyone a MacBook Pro, a home office with an adjustable desk, 4K monitor and so on. That requires a different budget than if you go for a good Windows laptop with a laptop stand and a regular mouse and keyboard.
To get off to a good start, it does help to set a budget. Then you also know in advance what your options are. Stick 10-20% on top for slack.
Step 3: Determine the scope
Determining scope will be the hardest part. You make it very clear what you are not doing. And that’s where Simplicity comes in. You don’t have 30 shades of grey. You only have black and white. Something you do and something you don’t. For example:
You have one type of laptop for your employees, not three different ones because you have an administrative employee, an engineer and a director.
Why not?
Because the cost to buy a laptop for an administrative employee versus a Surface for the director, is minimal. However, the TCO is much higher, because you have to have a spare for every device type. After all, things break. You must also have a slightly different image * for each type of device, including testing and so on.
One type, just less bullshit.
And that’s how you determine the scope, not just looking at the needs of one person, but of the entire company.
Not just looking at the need, but also at the operational effort required and its effect on productivity. That way, you get standards and uniformity.
You determine Simplicity within the scope. You weigh each choice by looking at the long-term value to the company. And you consider every time; what are the costs of this variation, what end-to-end effort is required for this variation, and can it be different.
Another example
Laptops come with a 3-year warranty as standard. After that, all repair costs are for yourself. After three years, laptops can start to show defects, for example, due to the amount of dust in the device or because the battery is running out.
These kinds of malfunctions make someone temporarily unable to work on that laptop. That affects productivity. And the loss of productivity costs money. Besides, users still store data on the hard disk. So, if the laptop breaks down, that data is gone.
After three years, the laptop is not yet written off. It still has value. It pays to refresh these laptops every three years. You will then receive the latest hardware, which performs the fastest, which has a 3-year warranty, and for the old laptops, you still get an excellent trade-in price. Also, the appreciation of the staff that they get a new laptop is gold!
The example above indicates that you should consider choices in their entirety, and not just at the purchase price.
* an image is a ready-to-use environment that, in addition to the operating system, contains a minimal setup of settings and applications that forms the basis of every device in a company. This allows identical devices to be quickly made operational in a standard way.
