Reducing tech friction takes diversity of tactics: roundtable

For an industry built on efficiency, the tech sector is bedeviled by small inconsistencies that add friction to workflows and projects.

Tech friction can snowball into larger issues in the workplace, including employee dissatisfaction and lower productivity, as IT Brew has previously reported. Fortunately, IT pros can develop strategies to manage that friction.

Look inward. Auditing your workflow is important to understand how your IT teams manage tools, Versa Networks CEO Kelly Ahuja said. Make sure that user access is set properly and that workloads and authentication are assigned to the correct environments.

“You have to say, ‘Hey, this particular user trying to disconnect to this particular application from this particular place, is it taking the best path or not? And if it’s not, how do I ensure that it takes the best path?’” Ahuja said. “There are technologies that allow that to happen.”

Despite the advantage offered by audits—i.e., visibility into what works and what doesn’t—technology is often moving too fast to rely on assessments that can be out of date nearly instantly. More adaptive solutions are better for addressing the challenges and making up-to-date calls on what goes where. Separating different workflows into platforms is key, Ahuja told IT Brew.

“Notice I said platforms, not platform, because one platform isn’t going to cover everything, and enterprises aren’t just going to rely on one thing to do everything, so you have to kind of break it up,” Ahuja said.

Completing work. How you look at the problem can define the solution. That may mean focusing less on auditing the way your team works, said Peter Yeung, CIO at Optimizely, and more on how you log activity to learn how best to deploy tools and avoid friction. If utilizing different tools leans to good performance, albeit with some hiccups, maintaining those outcomes needs to be a priority, even as you develop workarounds around any friction points.

“My advice would be around this concept of utilization to completion ratio—not just like, did the tool work, did it perform at the speed that it needed to perform, did somebody log into it?” Yeung said. “But graduate to, did the outcome that was expected from those tools or data sets do what it was meant to deliver?”

It can be difficult to implement workable changes—or at least difficult to see results immediately. That’s why Yeung feels that the best approach is case-by-case adjustments that integrate proper technologies as needed.

“As an IT group, we’re going to specific areas in sales, specific areas in customer success, specific areas in engineering, prioritizing it, and going, ‘Okay, where can we make the most impact from a company KPI perspective, and let’s really focus on making that group successful,’” Yeung said. “Once we’re done, we’ll go to the next group.”

Adaptability. Other ways to deal with tech friction, Matt Parsons, senior director of IT at Illumio, told IT Brew, often include adapting organizational processes to existing platforms like Teams and Slack where most tech work takes place. It’s part of overall IT hygiene, and an approach that meets teams where they digitally live is more likely to have success.

“Whatever problems you’re trying to solve, bring them to those platforms and solve them there,” Parsons said. “It ends up reducing friction, because you’re meeting people where they are instead of trying to pull them to another location—which is just going to compound friction and problems internally.”

Making sure things work is the best way to reduce friction, Parsons said, and integrating automation solutions into workflows is especially helpful for ensuring a smooth worker experience. But there are a number of different ways to approach the issue—and IT leaders need to be aware of them and keep them upfront in the decision-making process.

“If you want to do something well, it has to be naturally intuitive,” Parsons said.