Monitoring of teleworking infrastructure
There are several
key factors to consider in the telecommuting user experience:
- User PC performance.
- Performance and quality of the user's internet connection.
- Performance and quality of the connection of our office datacer or where we have the servers and resources: this includes the bandwidth and connection (DSL, fiber, etc.) as well as the performance of the VPN connection.
- Performance of servers and applications used by employees: ERP, CRM, etc, whether on our servers or in the cloud.
- If we use software in the SaaS cloud, the performance of the connection with these, depending on where they are hosted (private cloud or provider cloud)
These points represent a chain in teleworking and, as we know, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link so any inefficiency or drop in performance at any of these points will necessarily mean a bad user experience.
When we talk about user experience it may seem that it only impacts on how happy or unhappy our teleworkers are (which also, and this is a very important point) but the most relevant thing is that it is something that directly impacts on the efficiency and effectiveness of their work, on the performance of the worker.
This, of course, is something that already happened in the office, where the quality of the connections disappeared from the equation, but where there was a key element and sure enough it sounds to all of us:
"Hey, the ERP is going badly, is it happening to someone else?", or commenting on it with the IT people on a break. In our head at the office everything must be fine since we internalize precisely where there are usually more problems in the internet connections and since there are no such connections everything should go smoothly. Besides, it doesn't cost us anything to lift our heads from the monitor and ask questions aloud. In our home office maybe we can ask the cat, but as we are not yet used to using the communication tools (chat, etc.), we try "not to bother" and, moreover, we blame the problem on our children watching Netflix or our partner downloading something for his or her work, we do not give it importance, and we do not report it. Consequence: if before it took an hour to generate some purchases in the ERP, now it takes two hours.