Smoothing the Rough Edges of Digital Transformation with the Internet of Things

Talking to Customers: Witnessing the Rough Edges of Digital Transformation

One of the most enjoyable parts of my current role at Citrix has been engaging with customers. I've spent the better part of the past 2 years talking directly to both end users and administrators of Citrix technologies, with focused interactions in the Health Care, Higher Education and Technology verticals. Now customer engagement has always been part of any job that I have had, but traditionally that was tied to a specific product. I.e. here's what is new with our product, how could our product be better?, why aren't you using XX feature? etc… In my current role, the goal of customer engagement was to uncover challenges in current business workflows that prevent users from doing what they want and need to do and prevents the company from achieving their goals. That sounds like a broad goal, and it is, but it is amazing what you can learn when you don't ask leading questions, but instead you ask general questions like: "What are your top priorities", and then "What prevents you or slows you down in your attempts to achieve those goals and priorities." That approach is useful when the information you are trying to learn is how to adapt to broad changes in the workplace, and in our case, we were curious to drill into the pros and cons of the digital transformation of the workplace. More specifically, I was asked to look at how the Internet of Things could add value to products that Citrix sells, and the potential role of IoT in adding value to how users interact with technology and how it can enhance user workflows.

Here are a couple of examples: In our higher education interactions, we learned that all types of community colleges and universities are interested in online education, and the reasons for this interest varied. Some saw online EDU as a mechanism to broaden their reach to a new type of student, while some saw online EDU as a way to enhance how they teach on-premise students in a traditional brick and mortar education environment. That was not the surprising part, I'm sure we have all seen or experienced the rapid growth in online education. What was surprising was the difference in opinion from campus administration and the teachers themselves. Campus administration saw online education as an easy way to achieve a strategic priority (e.g. reach more students, or reach on campus students more effectively). Teachers though were frustrated by what they saw were mandates for them to turn away from teaching students, and to become more of a digital education orchestrator. Instead of just teaching, they had to learn the intricacies of lecture capture solutions, audio and video hardware, online streaming solutions, monitoring social engagement solutions and managing the movement of digital content into and out of learning management systems (LMS). This uncertainty around digital orchestration from a potentially technical novice is something I described as a 'rough edge to digital transformation'. A community college administrator expressed his frustration to me when he said "A big way to focus on student success factors is to let technology get out of the way", and right now the tech is often seen by teachers to be a barrier, not an enabler.

I heard the same sentiment in health care. The digitization of the patient record may be a regulatory requirement, but it is also seen as a way to improve health care by allowing for a consistent patient record throughout the life of the patient across multiple care providers. However, talking to health care clinicians, you hear the frustration in that interfacing with a computer instead of a patient is a negative, and in many opinions, this outweighs any potential positives. Clinicians often feel like they are more focused on orchestrating the flow of patient data instead of listening to the actual patient. A radiologist told me that "introducing technology that improves doctor productivity is a worthy goal if it means we can spend more time with our patients", but in his opinion, that is not happening and the result of adding technology to digitize the patient record is less time is spent with patients. A health care partner told me that the advent of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) has slowed down doctor/patient interactions to the point that a typical doctor in a health care clinic sees 5 to 9 fewer patients per day today than they did in the days before the adoption of EMRs. They said the goal of digital transformation in health care should be "…to make patient visits more personable with less time staring at a screen", but that the current technology tools in place are not enhancing or speeding up the doctor/patient interaction.

In both examples, just asking questions about goals, and what stands in the way of them unleashed plenty of examples and opinions of how digital transformation may have laudable goals, but the implementation of digital transformation has led to frustration amongst everyday users.

Digital Transformation: The Death of the Traditional Apps

One conclusion I came to during these 100+ customer conversations are the very nature of the applications we use in our daily lives is changing. The application model we are used to is one where the app sits in our data center (or the cloud) and presents information to us via a screen. But that is changing, apps are increasingly defined by the interaction of users, location, data, and devices. I read a recent article from James Staten who expressed this concept in the same fashion when he said: "Apps aren’t self-contained code anymore. Apps today are really workflows that integrate multiple components to deliver a defined customer experience, address a business need or enable a product or service capability."

In both of the cases I mentioned above I saw this new definition of an app put in play. And in both cases there were those rough edges around how those interactions were managed, that users are often frustrated by their role in managing, viewing, and participating in that interaction flow. This is where I believe the Internet of Things (IoT) represents an opportunity to smooth out these rough edges.

Context is King: The Value of IoT in the Enterprise

I've written before on the value of IoT in the Enterprise, that when you really dig deep beyond the hype that there is a lot more substance than just talking about the 'thing'. The real opportunity for IoT in the Enterprise is in managing and minimizing complexity. I don't want to ignore 'things', I've also talked in the past about how IoT is being driven by the rapid growth in devices and things, but that growth also yielding a massive increase in connections between users, devices, and things and there is tremendous value in those connections. These connections are yielding plenty of context about users and workspaces, and that context represents tremendous potential for smoothing out those rough edges I saw in my customer engagements by basically streamlining how interactive apps exchange information transparently without user interaction. Imagine a university professor entering a classroom, and the classroom detecting the presence of the professor as well as students and deploying workflows that started the class, all without the teacher having to interact with the technology other than advancing the content. Or a doctor entering a patient space that detected the presence of the doctor, the patient, and smart devices in the room and leveraged that information to spin up the appropriate resources, manage the flow of data, and present the right information to the doctor and patient, again with minimal user orchestration required. I know some of you may immediately jump to the potential security concerns with the automatic movement of data. But I think that this context can also enhance security, serving as an even stronger way to authenticate and authorize users, apps, and data.

To conclude, out of this experience my recommendation is to make sure when you talk to your customers you really listen with the intent to gain empathy, vs. leading the conversation in any specific direction. This experience led to many fun conversations and unexpected learnings, which over the past years has led to impactful proof of concepts we have put onsite with customers. In fact, if you are a Citrix customer and are heading to Citrix Synergy this May, I will be highlighting aspects of this 2-year journey in my Citrix Workspace IoT breakout session where we talk about the value in leveraging user context in making spaces and apps smarter.