People First, Technology Second

Over the past six months, I’ve spoken and written quite a bit about IT’s imperative to transition to a “people first, technology second” mentality, and focus more on delivering experiences than managing technology. In our consumer lives, we live in a mobile-first world of instant gratification with experie nces like Uber and Netflix. And now, for the first time in a very long time, enterprise IT has the opportunity to reach parity or even exceed the quality of those experiences. Think about it - you don’t have to look far to find enterprise software that is every bit as beautiful, easy to use, and powerful as what we use in our personal lives, and the traditional barriers that used to stand in the way of rolling those applications out have all but been removed.

So we’re entering an exciting inflection point that encourages and enables organizations to take a more “user-centric” approach to IT; one that I know many of you are already embracing. In fact, if you want a real life example, check out what our friend Ben Haines is doing over at Box.

As you know, I see Okta playing a critical role in the user-centric IT revolution. We’re effectively the springboard from which IT leaders can securely deploy and centrally manage any number of applications that make up the optimal end-user experience. But beyond being a platform for IT, we’re also an end-user facing application that is used by millions of people on a daily basis. So, in addition to making it easy and secure to deliver compelling experiences, a big part of our responsibility is to also BE one of those experiences.

To that end, I’m delighted to share a sneak peek of our new end-user UX. On top of a modern new design, one of the most exciting new features in our UX is the ‘tabs’ feature, which lets people create custom tabs by which to categorize and access their applications. These tabs serve as dashboards for your various uses - apps you use everyday, apps by project, personal apps vs work apps, or any categorization you wish. Even March Madness apps!

There is a lot more functionality wrapped into our new UX and we can’t wait to share this with you in the coming weeks. If you can’t wait that long and you want to get your hands on it right away, please let us know by emailing [email protected], and become a part of our limited beta program.

Happy March Madness!