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EMPOWER YOUR DIGITAL WORKFORCE Mission Focused by Being People Focused

A Digital Government Series by Unisys Corporation

TABLE OF CONTENTS The New Digital Workforce.................................................................. 3 Meet the New Boss: Digital Employees................................................ 3 Giving Workers the Power to Choose................................................... 3 Mission Focused by Being People Focused .......................................... 4 Seven Pillars of a Modern DIgital Government Workforce....................... 4 Getting From Here to There ............................................................... 7 Conclusion........................................................................................ 8

Empower Your Digital Workforce | 2

THE NEW DIGITAL WORKFORCE As technology breakthroughs permit greater choice and empowerment among government employees, Information Technology (IT) has a golden opportunity to proactively enable their progress. The way people work has changed radically over the past several years. Digital technologies and trends—such as the cloud, advanced data analytics, mobile, and social technologies, and the consumerization of IT—have created newer, more productive ways for agencies to carry out their mission responsibilities. They also have created new expectations among government workers about the capabilities and tools they need to perform those responsibilities. Today’s government users want support for mobile and social technologies. They want access to data wherever they are working. They want applications and services to work on any device they choose to use. They want their IT departments to rapidly deploy innovative solutions and services that are readily available in the commercial realm. Furthermore, they want a variety of options in how they access user support services, so they can get help in ways that work best for them. In short, modern government workers want more autonomy and more choices in how they use technology at work; similar to the many choices they have at home. Enabling the new digital workforce requires agencies to rethink how they provide Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) and End User Support (EUS) services. The traditional approach to EUS involved centralized, top-down decision-making. IT chose the hardware, the software, who would use it, what kind of training they would receive and—relevant to the topic here—what kind of support employees would or would not receive. This has led to some unintended consequences, including spiraling IT costs, heavy centralization of IT decisions, and a command-and-control atmosphere. It also has led to a widening gulf between IT staff and the operational and mission users they support. Now, that’s all changing. A new approach is evolving with all the rupture and excitement that accompanies change. IT has a golden opportunity to lead that change by implementing digital ITSM and EUS which empowers government workers by giving them the capabilities and tools to meet today’s mission requirements.

and they received whatever user support had been deemed appropriate for their levels and roles. But the power of the traditional organizational hierarchy is eroding. Leading organizations are reaping efficiency and performance success through their commitment to employee empowerment. Instead of dictating and delivering to employees the technology they will use, organizations are encouraging employees to take charge of the applications, services, and devices that best meet their individual needs. The consumerization of IT is a major driver of this change. It has created employees who tend to be digitally well equipped in their personal lives. With no help desk to call at home, they have become comfortable researching their own needs, installing their own applications, and trouble-shooting their own issues. When better technology comes along, they are often quick to upgrade. In contrast, at work, these same employees are forced to use legacy devices and technology.

GIVING WORKERS THE POWER TO CHOOSE At work, these tech-wise, digital employees could easily usurp key roles that IT used to provide. In their own areas of responsibility, they are quick to research useful applications. They find installation unintimidating, almost intuitive. And when it comes to troubleshooting issues with their applications, they are more likely to find solutions by mass-querying others who share their job responsibilities than by asking internal IT support to open a ticket. They are the ultimate self-educators. Government employees are also under pressure to perform, so they are constantly looking for new tools to help them conduct their jobs more effectively. However, many are reluctant to go through IT channels to get what they need if they don’t have to. The result is an increase in Shadow IT—that is, systems or solutions used within an organization without the approval, or even the knowledge, of departmental IT. In a matter of minutes, employees can purchase a low-cost license, install it, and even import agency data and integrate it with other enterprise applications on their own without IT’s involvement or knowledge.

MEET THE NEW BOSS: DIGITAL EMPLOYEES

Another area of employee choice is their workplace. Workplace used to have a simple definition. It was the office, or factory, or shop where the organization provided employees with the tools of the trade. Now the workplace is fluid and dynamic, and the tools of the trade must be available whenever and wherever the employee chooses to work.

In the digital economy, users are choosers. IT enables their choices. This is true for government employees and citizens alike. Traditionally, logic dictated employees to be subordinate to an organization’s hierarchy and infrastructure—hired to fit, slotted in, with their jobs defined accordingly. Employees used devices and applications prescribed by IT for those jobs,

Does this mean the IT department’s role is less important in this new democratized environment where users drive technology decisions? Not at all. Although the power of choice is shifting to users, the power of innovatively responding to their needs rests with IT. In that sense, IT’s power to influence mission success has never been greater.


BEING MISSION FOCUSED BY BEING PEOPLE FOCUSED The new people-focused digital environment recognizes that government employees—and not just its IT systems—perform an agency’s mission-critical work. So, what does it mean to be a people-focused IT organization? It means prioritizing IT spending based on the mission responsibilities and needs of agency employees. It also means delivering exactly the right service to exactly the right user at exactly the right time and place. Agencies can accomplish this latter goal through the creation of “personas” that reflect selected user preferences and needs. Creating effective personas depends on smart real-time analytics to ascertain those preferences and needs and then, automatically delivering services based on each user’s persona. This enables people to find the tools and services that make them most productive. By focusing on their employees’ requirements, agencies can reduce IT costs, gain efficiencies, and proactively enhance end-user mission performance. At the same time, “as-a-service” delivery models will enable IT departments to be more agile and responsive to changing digital technologies and requirements, while also demonstrating to employees IT’s added value. As a result, this will help prevent unwanted Shadow IT—and its related costs and risks—from spreading or taking hold. People-focused EUS rests on a foundation of robust ITSM because IT is the service provider to the agency’s employees. To efficiently support a more mobile, dispersed digital workforce, organizations need services and support on a global scale that are underpinned by consistent, certified delivery processes. Government IT departments have always been expected to provide a secure, stable, and wellmanaged infrastructure, but in today’s dynamic IT environment, they must deliver innovative, fast-evolving services that are accessible and transparent to users—and do so with the speed and agility to support today’s digital workforce.

SEVEN PILLARS OF A MODERN DIGITAL GOVERNMENT WORKFORCE All these unleashed human capabilities create an environment that cannot be supported by the traditional service desk alone. Instead, seven pillars of enablement will guide EUS of the future: digital ITSM, profiling, self-service, service aggregation, social sourcing, real-time data access, and security and governance. 1. Digital ITSM for Robust Service Orchestration and Delivery One of the key challenges when transitioning to digital EUS is effectively managing a complex IT environment. The environment will consist of both legacy and digital systems. It likely will include a mix of Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) deployed within a hybrid cloud that is managed by multiple cloud providers. The applications and systems will serve a diverse set of government users who will access data and services from multiple types of devices. Consequently,

By focusing on their employees’ requirements, agencies can reduce IT costs, gain efficiencies, and proactively enhance end-user mission performance.

agencies need ITSM that can provide a unified, comprehensive view of their digital environment to ensure that all IT resources work together in the most efficient manner. Fully integrated ITSM will exploit data to provide: • Service Intelligence to assess the performance of IT services and related components, including how well they support the agency’s business and mission functions.

• Application Intelligence to understand how an application performs down to the transaction level in order to monitor, maintain, and resolve issues. Through Application Intelligence, agencies can maintain service levels and the associated interdependencies by proactively identifying, isolating, and resolving issues.

• Infrastructure Intelligence to collect, process, analyze, and manage data from physical and virtual assets, including cloud assets, in order to give the agency visibility and insights into its infrastructure components and their interconnections.

Putting in place the right ITSM will enable agencies to establish a service-minded approach to IT operations. Agencies should support people-centric EUS that progresses from reactive support to proactive support and, finally, to predictive support to leverage data and analytics that effectively manage assets, anticipate problems, and address future needs. 2. Personas for Customization Standardized IT support services made sense in an era when government employees typically worked with technology the same


way, but that environment no longer serves the needs of the modern organization. Today’s workers operate in highly diverse ways. Some require stringent security measures, while others need just the basics. Some have do-or-die deadlines, and many don’t. Some work alone, others in close collaboration. Typically, digital workers make very personal technology choices. They may use a variety of devices, depending on where they are working—often screen sharing with colleagues or checking work email after dinner. They may tap into cloud-based and virtualized apps on their tablets, productivity apps downloaded to their phones from an app store, or traditional fat-client apps on their notebooks. If they need technical support, they might call the service desk, chat online with tech support, or try to self-serve. So, how do you elevate your existing end-user services to meet the needs of the digital workforce? The first step is to adopt a brand new way of looking at employees. View them as “profiles” or “personas” defined by how they need and prefer to work. The concept is modeled on persona-based marketing that has been a resounding success for the marketing profession. Marketing uses business analytics about customer needs, channel preferences, and buying habits to construct a set of iconic customers and then tailors messaging to appeal to each of these iconic customers. In similar fashion, persona-based EUS utilizes consulting discussions and business analytics to construct “iconic employees” or “personas” based on their business processes, key performance indicators, working habits, attitudes toward technology and support; and their work experience. Then it designs IT strategies and support services aligned to serve each persona. Questions like these help shape emerging personas: What is a typical “day in the life” for different user types? What are their operational and mission goals, daily challenges, and job processes? How sensitive is their work from a security and compliance viewpoint? What information and services do they need to be highly productive? How will their roles and processes change as the organization and mission requirements evolve? When people have similar work processes, do so in like environments, and share a general attitude about technology—that’s a persona, and one for which IT customizes a support solution. 3. Self-Service and Self-Resolution Customer satisfaction skyrockets when buyers go online and customize their cars, pizzas, jeans, or whatever they are buying. Employees experience the same satisfaction when they choose the what, how, and when that allows them to best perform their jobs.

It’s not just the customization that is satisfying; it’s also the self-service aspect. Car buyers could provide their list of desired options to a salesperson and ultimately end up with the car and options they wanted, but that’s time consuming and depends on somebody else’s timetable and place of work. Self-service erases the dependence on others and allows the individual to proceed at their own pace. Customers can design their dream cars at their convenience while playing with the options, comparing prices, and scouting other customers’ comments. It’s easier and typically, results in a better outcome for the buyer. For the employee, self-service offers a similar satisfaction. No more trying to explain a business problem in IT terms or trying to understand IT terms as they apply to the business problem. Selfservice offers efficiency, flexibility, and delight in being able to perform their job on their terms. And if you’ve ever sat next to a lunch table of workers enthusiastically comparing their apps, you know it offers fun as well. People are clearly trending toward “self-resolution” for the same reasons they opt for self-service. Self-resolution increasingly is seen as the more efficient, empowering, educational, and personally rewarding choice. Leading organizations automate this process by identifying recurring problems and by developing algorithms that enable users to resolve them with a single click. 4. Service Aggregation or Single Source Service Catalog End users in need of IT support typically need a resolution immediately because they are already experiencing a work interruption. Frustrated and impatient, they have little tolerance for long searches, wrong paths, or imprecise answers or solutions to their problem. Enter the single source service catalog. The single source service catalog is a comprehensive aggregation of all the services and products employees might possibly need; it’s easily searchable and geared in advance to their particular persona—that’s the “Amazon service procurement model.” It’s a single, trusted source for just about everything a customer might need, and it is customized to each customer persona based on the knowledge an IT organization amasses. Like Amazon, an IT group operating on this principle is prepared to provide not only the product or service that the user requests but also recommend ancillary services and products that the user probably needs but may not be aware of. For example, a user ordering a particular laptop would be advised of the two or three keyboards best suited for that device along with the software packages already approved for that device in the user’s organization. Setting up a single source service catalog requires an IT organization skilled in negotiating with provider partners so as to


get the best quality for their users at the best price. It also requires careful maintenance and frequent assessment of user satisfaction and trust. Otherwise users will seek out other sources. 5. Social Sourcing as the New Service Desk In traditional EUS, employee problems were handled as they happened. If you had a computer problem, you called IT and they responded according to the service level they applied to your job level, solved your problem, and went on to the next ticket. Organizations in the digital economy stood that model on its head. They integrate social technologies to enable employees to communicate widely and instantaneously for purposes of problem resolution, collaboration, and individual and organizational learning. After all, knowledge workers aren’t just experts—they are experts who traffic in the expansion and sharing of knowledge that feeds specific business and mission purposes. Early government forays into social technologies tended toward the chaotic, establishing Facebook and Twitter accounts with uncertain purpose and little to no strategy. Mature, socially minded organizations, however, take a strategic purposeful approach. They establish employee personas. This allows employees to create an organizational presence, build a network of colleagues, and articulate their areas of expertise so they can be tapped for insights and answers as needed. Employees have the ability to add free-form topics that integrate with search to connect questions posted by employees with a topic hashtag and direct it to colleagues who have the respective topic tag in their profile. If you have a question about cybersecurity, you could post a question in the newsfeed using “#cybersecurity” and experienced cybersecurity professionals will see it. Long gone are the days of the “Does anyone know…?” email. They establish strategic communities.Strategic communities strengthen knowledge transfer, evolve expertise and skill sets, and foster creativity that leads to innovations in areas that matter most to the business. Unlike organic informal communities, strategic communities require an infrastructure that closely integrates subject matter expertise with authoritative knowledge content, education, training, and external market data to be truly effective. Certainly, crowdsourcing a problem could be done, but community sourcing is usually more efficient. They make the social technology intrinsic to how employees work. If leveraging social business tools becomes an extra thing that employees have to do, it will fail most likely. To succeed in social business transformation, the technologies must be embedded in the way your employees routinely do their jobs.

Employees shouldn’t be required to switch devices or eliminate apps that alter their ordinary work stream. They focus on proactivity. It’s great when employees quickly receive rich, informed responses when they raise a question. It’s almost guaranteed that somewhere in the organization somebody else already asked the questions and now has the answer. Mature digital organizations work hard to identify those issues in advance and capture that information for future usage. They populate their social technologies with well-written single topic blogs, timely newsfeeds, and other relevant topics carefully curated for immediate access. 6. Real-Time Data Access While many organizations store all types of data, employee access to the data often remains problematic. Data is hard to find and hard to access. In response, many organizations focus on better warehousing and access to the data, confident that more employees—utilizing steadily improving analytic tools— will make better business decisions and improve the overall productivity of the organization. Another equally pressing issue is the matter of proactivity. For example, traditional recruiters depended heavily on obtaining resumes, but often the best candidates may not have a “searchable” resume. However, these candidates probably have a sufficient online presence that recruiters can find. Such sources include membership in professional organizations, speeches, blogs, LinkedIn and similar sites. By becoming more proactive, recruiters are more selective and find the best candidates who don’t have their resume posted in obvious places online. Smart digital organizations will employ data and analytics effectively in EUS. A challenge for one user is likely to be experienced by many others. When a solution is found, the data should be immediately integrated into the help desk so that other users can prevent or selfresolve the problem. Twitter and other social channels also should be mined for helpful comments for integration with EUS. An additional challenge is posed by the plethora of devices and applications employees use in their work. If access to the application is time-consuming or non-intuitive, requires them to switch devices, or is too tightly controlled, employees won’t use it. Like the social channels discussed above, data analytics and tools must align with the way employees work. Lastly, no matter how knowledgeable employees are about their data needs, most are not data scientists. Digital organizations employ data scientists not just to extract valuable insights from vast data stores, but also to make those insights consumable and actionable by employees whose work will benefit from it.


7. Security and Governance A sped-up, flattened organization poses fresh security challenges. When everybody has access to data analytics and employees select their own devices and applications, traditional security measures may not withstand advanced security threats.

2. Social Business – If an agency has not yet matured its internal social business capabilities, it will be hard-pressed to create an efficient and effective social sourcing “help desk.” It needs to first focus on establishing an active social business network internally, with high participation rates, and then, use that to its advantage in EUS.

The content must be protected, and users must demand strong authentication that doesn’t hamper productivity.

3. Procurement Partners – Simultaneously with the social sourcing initiative, it’s important to begin establishing trusted relationships with reliable providers of the services and products end users will wish to procure. They key is to launch with a vast services catalog mapped to personas so users immediately turn to the catalog rather than looking externally for their needs to be met.

In our paper, “The New Security Paradigm for Digital Government,” we discuss the security challenges in greater depth. But from the standpoint of EUS in the digital economy, the focus will be two-fold. First and foremost, is securing each digital worker with user authentication, often through innovative biometrics like facial, voice, palm, or gesture recognition, perhaps in addition to conventional security measures. User authentication is still considered the Holy Grail in cybersecurity, but most organizations will continue to buttress it by one or more of the following means: securing the device (by making it unusable if it’s lost or stolen), securing the application (through application wrapping), securing data in motion (by using network-level firewalls and encryption), and securing data at rest (by encrypted containers on the devices). As for the strategy in securing the data, digital enterprises will focus on identifying what information must be protected first, and then, on compartmentalizing access, so each user has access only to what they need when they need it.

GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE Transforming EUS will necessarily unfold in different ways at different agencies. Customer EUS transformation will require a different approach from employee EUS transformation. Large government agencies with heavily entrenched legacy IT support groups will face a different set of challenges from smaller agencies springing up with a blank slate for EUS. Regardless, four main steps will usually be required to launch a transformation of this significance. 1. Personas – The first step is to analyze users with an eye toward establishing the agency’s main personas. It’s not necessary to start from scratch. Leading agencies have already traveled far down this path establishing relevant criteria. The main focus should be placed on identifying features unique to the agency.

4. Analytics – No matter how informed and careful the initial launch of a transformed EUS, there is much to learn about evolving customer and employee needs, their satisfaction with the services and products provided, and new needs they have not been identified. EUS needs to develop its own ongoing data analytics to ensure its value to the organization.

CONCLUSION At one time, “standardization” was the watchword. Agencies saved money by standardizing the applications and services they made available to users. Standardization reduced costs and complexity associated with developing, deploying, and supporting a large variety of applications. But the ease of management created by standardization also resulted in one-size-fits-all solutions that ultimately hampered the performance of users who needed tools and services better tailored to their specific mission requirements and preferences for accessing data and services. The challenge for agencies today is how to achieve the low costs and efficiencies of standardization while delivering more personalized IT services and support to users. Digital technologies now make it possible to achieve these dual goals. Advanced data analytics provide a foundation for intelligent ITSM that delivers a comprehensive view for managing IT resources and ensuring that they work together in the most efficient manner. Analytics also provide the foundation for creating personas and delivering services and support based on user preferences and needs. This peoplefocused approach enables users to consume IT and IT support that is tailored to their capabilities and requirements, enhancing both satisfaction and mission performance.


THE UNISYS SERIES ON DIGITAL GOVERNMENT What does it take to succeed as a digital organization? We live in a digital world fueled by an endless stream of ubiquitous technologies embedded in products, persons, and places. Information technology (IT) is so pervasive in every aspect of government activities that it is transforming, sometimes disrupting, how agencies deliver services and perform critical missions. For start-up businesses conceived as digital entities, adopting the new will be second nature. But government agencies obliged to transition from their physical origins to their digital future will find themselves challenged by uncertainty, power shifts, and moving boundaries.

Some of those transformations are already visible, others are predictable, and still others are unknown and so far unknowable. Every agency must anticipate what “digital organization” can mean for its operating model, citizen customers, and employees. They must answer: How are new digital technologies affecting our mission environment? How can we innovate or change to capitalize on digital capabilities? To help government agencies anticipate and adapt to the transformational potential of digital technologies, this series of primers by Unisys will answer these, and many more, questions.

ABOUT UNISYS Unisys is a global information technology company working with government clients across the globe to drive innovation and transform citizen-centric services through leading-edge digital initiatives, including cloud deployments, applications modernization, security solutions, and advanced data analytics. Supporting more than 300 government organizations around the world, Unisys provides IT consulting services and delivers innovative solutions that facilitate the transition to Digital Government. To find out more about how our solutions can work for you, please visit http://www.unisys.com/offerings/security-solutions.

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