How Businesses Can Put People First: Announcing the User-Centric IT Initiative

There’s a certain kind of satisfaction you get when you turn on your phone, tablet and computer, open an application and find it just works. Like when you select an icon and a cab appears at your location right when you need it. Or when you push a button and that photo of your brother’s graduation is instantly shared with all of your friends. Such easy interactions let us get back to doing what’s actually important more quickly, whether it be getting home or enjoying our time with family and friends.

As consumers, we’ve come to expect this ease-of-use with our experiences with technology -- experiences centered strictly around our individual likes and needs. It’s a trend that’s allowing people to not only do more online, but do so more quickly and easily than ever before. It’s also changing our daily habits and disrupting the way we approach technology, both in our personal and work lives.

Enter a group of enterprise CEOs that are making it our mission to bring people to the forefront of enterprise IT. We want to help businesses move away from traditional IT infrastructures to models that put the user at the center -- enabling IT leaders to offer more productive experiences across the workplace. It’s a different way of approaching IT, and folks like Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm), the CEOs from Box, GoodData, Jive, Marketo, Skyhigh Networks, Zendesk and I have joined together to support IT departments making this shift.

As a first step, we’ve developed five core principles that define a user-centric organization:

1. User-Centric IT serves businesses by empowering people, engaging them with the best tools possible so they can work better, smarter and more productively.

2. User-Centric IT adapts to the way people work, not the other way around because technology should fit seamlessly into people’s workflows.

3. People, information and knowledge must connect in real time to enable collaboration across teams, organizations and industries.

4. Mobility is a work-style preference, not a device so it’s imperative that we give people secure access to any app, from any device, at any time.

5. Security should be inherent and transparent to the user experience, keeping valuable business information safe without creating friction for users.

The next steps will be up to IT leaders to embrace a new framework that puts the needs of their users first, allowing them to be more productive, agile and effective.

If you’re someone who is already embracing user-centric IT – or want to be – join the movement.