Game of Thrones, House of Cards and the Enterprise User Experience

Like most offices on Monday mornings, ours tends to be abuzz with talk of Sunday night television. We have a faction of Game of Thrones fans, some Walking Dead-heads and our marketing team is anxiously awaiting the second season of Netflix’s House of Cards. And that’s only part of the reason why we enjoyed our CEO Todd McKinnon’s latest contributions in GigaOm and TechCrunch.

Todd’s piece in GigaOm, ‘Finding the HBO or the Netflix of the enterprise: What we’ve all been waiting for,’ discusses how today’s television programming contains more diverse and niche content thanks to technical advances that enable smaller, specialty networks to produce and distribute more at lower costs – and how that change mirrors a similar explosion of software. As Todd explains, successful companies are emerging to serve certain niche markets thanks to the proliferation of devices and increased connectivity among users, and as a result, the end user has more apps to choose from.

If you regularly follow us, I’m sure you already know that we’re always talking about benefits for the end user. People-centric IT was the focus of our inaugural user conference this year and the inspiration for Todd’s recent contribution to TechCrunch, ‘Perfecting The Enterprise End User Experience.’ Just as the user experience is what drives consumer technologies from Uber and GoPro, the user experience is essential to any modern technology project. In his piece, Todd outlines how organizations need to prioritize usability to deliver new experiences, empowering our employees, customers and partners to be more productive, creative and competitive instead of gatekeepers.

Sure, I love being able to talk about my favorite tv shows with my coworkers, but our work at Okta is about so much more than office small talk. It’s about empowering our customers and focusing on their experiences, and that’s what Todd’s latest pieces are all about.