November means Thanksgiving in the United States, and with several countries celebrating holidays focused on thanks and remembrance, we'd like to take a moment to salute the IT experience.

As consumers of IT, we "users" often think of IT in two ways. First, it is the place where we get new devices and apps. (Admit it, you know exactly how many days it is until your laptop is eligible for an upgrade!) Second, it is the place we don't want to have to contact with a problem. But just as every river holds two shores, there is the other side of this IT experience as well.

We, as users of IT, often don’t consider IT's role in making sure we have a great experience—all the time, effort, and cost that goes into discovering, managing, securing, and servicing the technology we rely on every day to get our jobs done. Let’s bridge the two sides of the experience with the following scenarios.

The new smartphone

So you picked up the latest smartphone this weekend. Surely you'll want to be able to connect to your work email and productivity apps. In order to do this, IT needs to know this device exists (and verify that it’s yours) in order to help sync all your information.

The blue screen of %*&#!

It happens to all of us. But do you ever report it? When it happens a couple of times over a month, do you ever wonder what it was? No, but you wouldn’t mind if it stopped happening. Thankfully, IT makes it go away by gathering all the pertinent data. They need visibility into what processes are using resources on your machine when it happens.

Do you secure your own apps?

"My computer notified me there are updates to the app," says a user to an IT professional. It also told you that the FBI had locked your device last week. Making sure apps are secured with the latest and most urgent patches is part of the behind-the-scenes magic IT security teams deliver.

You might use that software again

Users do this often: They request an app they need for a particular task, and then don’t use the application again for months (or ever again). How many software licenses are underutilized while also compressing available budget? Reclaiming and redistributing licenses optimize costs and make IT resources available for users who truly need them.

Back to the office (or not)

The dining room table, living room sofa, front porch, or (if you’re lucky) home office desk have become popular work spaces in 2020. The devices we carry change as we migrate from room to room: laptop at the table, tablet for those long video calls hosted in the backyard, and the smartphone anytime we’re craving a walk. Making the remote work experience as flexible and close to your old office desk experience has taken a lot of fast action by IT.

Have you tried this fix?

Often users cringe at calling IT for help because of the battery of diagnostic and basic troubleshooting steps they have to work through. The IT analyst diligently works to uncover the fix, even while hearing the user sigh through each test. However, these troubleshooting steps can’t be discounted, as they often resolve the incident.

In this season of thanks, we’re happy to deliver Ivanti Neurons to help IT address these and the numerous other user requests they support each day. Our hyper-automation platform is designed to improve IT’s experience so these teams can deliver a better experience to end users.

With Ivanti Neurons, IT has the power to discover those new devices, use automation to remediate the issues user report (and the ones they don’t!), secure endpoints and apps wherever users are working, while optimizing IT’s spend on software across the estate. So, here’s to you, IT! We’re thankful to be your partner to deliver personalized end user experiences at faster speed, with higher accuracy, and optimized cost.