Leading an IT team often involves a careful balancing act between two priorities. On one hand, IT leaders must have an eye for innovation in order to keep up with rapidly changing environments. Meanwhile, there’s the constant pressure to reduce technological costs and ensure that IT is driving real value for the business.
Within a nonprofit organization, managing these two priorities becomes an even more delicate process.
At FHI 360, our employees deliver programs that provide lifesaving health care, education, and economic opportunities to communities all over the globe. So it’s imperative that my team on the IT side of the organization is able to innovate, evolve, and leave no stone unturned when it comes to enabling workers to make every project a success.
But as a nonprofit, it’s our duty to ensure that every dollar we’re entrusted with makes the most impact possible. When we invest in technology, we don’t come to any decision lightly: we test, analyze, and continuously iterate to ensure that there are no inefficiencies causing unnecessary IT costs.
So how can a support team improve experiences for employees, while also maximizing the dollar value of their IT initiatives? For us at FHI 360, we accomplish this goal by making sure that actionable data drives every decision we make.
Data-Driven Innovation: Two Success Stories
Over the past several years, our IT strategy at FHI 360 has become heavily reliant on data – not only the security and accessibility of data, but also leveraging data to dramatically reduce the costs of our IT initiatives.
This data-driven strategy has been particularly impactful since the transition to remote work. We’ll illustrate this impact with two IT initiatives we used to improve employee experience without driving costs:
Story #1: Solving Memory Issues
During the early stages of remote working, we began to notice that memory utilization rates were skyrocketing across the organization – especially for the communication tool Microsoft Teams. If we didn’t fix this problem, it would become a systemic issue and cause slowdowns and device issues for a vast majority of our employees.
In the past, we might’ve looked to solve this issue by purchasing entire new machines – an extremely costly solution. But with access to real-time employee experience data, we were able to recognize that upgrading from 8 GB to 16 GB RAM would allow for our devices to stay up-to-speed and meet the demands of our new remote work environments.
We brought this data to our leadership team, and were able to fix the issue before it became a drastic problem – and did so by spending a fraction of what we would’ve spent if the experience data hadn’t helped us to proactively address the problem in the most cost-effective way possible.
Just how much did we save? According to our cost avoidance tracker, this memory improvement initiative enabled us to avoid almost $300,000 in IT costs.
Story #2: Supporting Power Users
With the right data, we don’t have to choose between cutting costs and preparing a better future for our digital environment – we can accomplish both simultaneously, as this next example illustrates.
As is the case with most companies, FHI 360 has a number of employees whose jobs require them to use more resource-demanding technology than others. We began to notice a high volume of issues with these employees using Power BI apps, automation tools and the like. In order for these power users to have better experiences and remain productive, our team had to determine what hardware improvement we could make to support them.
At first, we were looking into making one-off hardware purchases for these users – machines that cost upwards of $4,000. But this wasn’t a sustainable long-term solution. It would be extraordinarily expensive right out of the gate – and would only become a costlier initiative down the line when other employees needed to adopt these Power BI apps and thus need new machines as well.
So we decided to analyze our environment and revisit our standards so we could both address these power users and support our regular users who may later need the same capabilities. We believed at the time that our decision would be predicated on gigahertz speed, and that we’d need to upgrade to i7 extreme or i9 extreme processors – but our data analysis led to new discoveries.
Looking at a subset of machines, we performed analysis on a variety of queries over a 30-minute interval – and what we realized was that processer speed wasn’t the issue at all. We found that CPU core count was actually the key differentiator in utilization across devices. The same power applications were showing vast differences in usage rates on six- or eight-core machines compared to four-core machines.
We performed further testing and ultimately determined that transitioning to eight-core processors would be a more sustainable option that investing in entirely new, expensive machines. Not only could we address our current power users, but also future individuals who decide they need to access the same applications. In that scenario, we won’t have to continue making new investments, as the functionality will already be built-in to the employees’ devices.
Evolving IT support in a globally distributed environment
Our increasingly data-driven strategy has helped us drive tremendous value for the organization by reducing IT costs – and it’s also streamlined our strategy so that we have more time to focus on initiatives that improve employee engagement.
With employees working in over 65 countries, connectivity between IT and employees became an even bigger priority in the wake of the pandemic. We evolved our support model in a number of ways to address a distributed workforce.
The examples above illustrate some of the technical projects we’ve been able to implement. But we also added a number of remote support channels, including:
- A Teams channel where staff can jump in and get support right away, wherever they are – replicating the experience of walking over to the support desk in an office.
- “Virtual house calls” where employees can schedule one-on-one time with a technician at a time of their choosing.
Given the number of employees we have working across the globe in different time zones, it was imperative for us to establish more connectivity between IT and employees beyond the standard process of opening a support ticket.
As we explore new forms of innovation, including automation and machine learning, our strategic focus is to enable employees to work from anywhere, at any time, with the exact tools they need to be successful. And with the right experience data at our disposal, we’ll be able to drive the most value possible from each and every IT initiative we look to implement.