Democratisation of enterprise-grade technology to fuel innovation

By Simon Johnson, General Manager of UK&I, Freshworks.

  • Friday, 7th October 2022 Posted 2 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Democratisation of technology, where access to technology rapidly continues to become more accessible to more people, has risen to be a huge trend. With the potential to introduce innovation and long-term resiliency within organisations, executives now see tech democratisation as critical to their ability to scale.

As new technologies emerge, and pressure on business leaders increases, there is no better time to take a deeper look at this topic. Whether it’s moving from paper to spreadsheets, or turning to modern SaaS solutions to manage our business, we now have the chance to reimagine how we work, and how we engage our employees and customers — with digital technology on our side.

Why democratisation of enterprise-grade tech matters

As technology advances and permeates every aspect of the workplace, more and more employees are able to use technology to perform their job. Despite organisation’s recognising the positive impact that technology can have on business success, enterprise IT such as cloud-based ITSM (Information Technology Service Management), CMS (Content Management Systems) and business intelligence systems can often be overlooked, especially by SMEs.

Yet, by implementing the right enterprise technology at the right scale, companies can vastly improve their overall efficiency and performance in the market as well as improve employee productivity, communication, collaboration and satisfaction company-wide.

Democratising the right way

There are some defining steps companies should consider in their efforts to achieve technology democratisation. The first is accessibility; ensuring tech is accessible to your entire workforce is the most important step to democratising technology. Companies must assess how easily, with optimal training, a particular technology can be made available to their staff.

There is often a false assumption that in order to effectively implement enterprise IT, businesses will require an in-house expert or a tech-savvy team to deploy and use the technology. But in fact, the democratisation of technology is to a degree, a self-sustaining cycle. Modern ITSM tools to manage workflows are themselves not only easy to use – which is essential for driving access, but are also now easy to deploy and manage with a few specialised skills.

This is a key reason why modern ITSM solutions are finding more and more uses across businesses in all industries, automating repetitive tasks to free staff up for more value-creating work, driving efficiencies, and improving overall employee and customer experience. By searching for solutions that include out-of-the-box features based on pragmatic best-practice, your business will be able to deploy an ITSM solution quickly, enabling easier adoption, at scale.

Driving adoption is also important to getting full value from democratising technology. The measure of adoption is how widely a particular technology is used by the work force – having employees ask for access to a tool they see is saving a colleague time, is a great measure of success. Naturally, the rates of adoption will depend on a variety of factors like ease of use, whether the individuals are digitally adept, and the level of engagement required.

While digitally adept employees will likely act as the change agents, it is important that the change is seen through the overall business and processes of an organisation – i.e. through HR, Sales, as well

as IT. Therefore, ensuring this technology can be, and is engrained into all departments will enable greater collaboration across the company, and therefore greater efficiencies.

Lastly, to properly democratise tech, it must be available anywhere and everywhere – this is especially true in today’s hybrid working world. Leaders must consider how available the technology is across geographies, remote work locations, the full range of devices etc.

Fortunately, with modern ITSM solutions, you can deliver fast, scalable and secure services to your employees across all teams, office locations and time zones. If the answer is that any employee can access the platform at any given moment, then it’s likely you are on the right track to democratising your IT.

The core benefits of democratising enterprise tech

It can be said that when all the above steps have been considered, democratisation of enterprise tech like ITMS is easy to achieve. It is therefore a no-brainer, especially when you consider the myriad of benefits that unified service management solutions can bring to your business – namely delivering delight to employees by increasing efficiency, productivity and satisfaction, but also by helping you realise greater ROI.

With robust automations, employees can eliminate repetitive tasks and manual processes, and drive service efficiency using no-code workflows. Not only will this liberate your employees of mundane processes that lead to productivity hurdles for your IT team, it will also drive service efficiency using no-code workflows and powerful automations.

Having a single integrated service management platform can bridge silos, improve time to resolution, reduce costs, and improve visibility. Having a single integrated system also enables you to leverage the power of enterprise AI engines that sit at the heart of many modern ITSM solutions, so your employees can make smarter service desk decisions, increasing agent productivity, and elevating employee experiences.

Looking ahead to the future

The future looks bright for companies successfully implementing enterprise technology, especially for those achieving democratisation. The demand for increased agility and flexibility by today’s workforce means that the IT team are no longer the sole ‘gatekeepers’ to this kind of technology, and departments company-wide have a lot to gain.

For business leaders, choosing technology that is easily accessible is key, and consulting with employees to get them on board with the changes will help ensure that the democratisation of IT flows through the business, irrespective of size. When you have people bought into the ITSM system, and extending use to even wider effect, you drive improved customer and employee experience.