Goals for your IT Team When They Free Up Time Through Automation

Back in October, I was lucky enough to visit my friends at ShareGate, along with fellow MVPs Jasper Oosterveld (@jappie1981) and Maarten Eekels (@maarteneekels) We had several conversations with ShareGate’s Laurent St. Pierre (@laurent_sp), and those were recorded and released as a series of videos: The evolution of IT: Improving digital employee experience to boost productivity. The conversations have also led to ongoing asynchronous discussions about the things we said, for more elaboration and to expand on our thoughts.

Recently, ShareGate’s Rafael Spuldar did a new blog post: 5 IT Goals for Your Team When They Free up Time – ShareGate.

Emily Mancini (@eemancini) and I had kicked around the topic and came up with the following list of ideas. Some made it into Rafael’s post, and others didn’t, so I figured I’d post our full list here.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

1. Clean up AD/AAD data – In most cases, targeting content to the right people is based on AAD data. This data determines which people belong in particular Microsoft 365 Group, especially if they are dynamic groups. If the organization can actually rely on that data being correct, they can build out much more personalized experiences. In most organizations, not only is the data wrong, but everyone knows it’s wrong and they can’t rely on it. No one even tries to get it fixed because they think it’s pointless. Spending time improving this data provides many benefits.
2. Focus on consultative customer service – If you’re like many IT departments, people don’t come to you for advice and assistance because they can’t get your time. Set up an informal (or formal) consulting capability for the organization. Let anyone in the organization get in touch during office hours to help them think through technical issues and starting solutions for themselves. This consultative focus can also become “market sensing”, in that it tells you what the organization is doing and what they need that you aren’t providing. Unless you have an amazing help desk, they probably don’t fulfill this role. Help desks tend to focus on solving immediate problems (which everyone wants them to do), and not longer-term efforts. If nothing else, it’s a different mindset.
3. Think about places you could solve problems – Imagine going out into the organization and saying something like “We know you struggle with people filling out so many of these forms. We’d like to help you automate and improve the process.” You’d be heroes! In other words, do external outreach in the organization: offering the very services you have capacity for – for free! You’ll be amazed at the goodwill this engenders.
4. Search analysis – Take a look at the searches people are doing and what happens. How many searches lead to useful results, and how many fail? A failed search is a content opportunity, and a successful search means that content matters and may need a review. That doesn’t mean that you in IT need to do that review, but you’d be providing great information to the content owners to make their content more valuable. You have the tools to do this in Microsoft 365, but many organizations simply don’t.
5. Run the assessment tool – The Microsoft 365 Assessment tool was created to help people move from classic to modern and from on prem to the cloud originally. It’s been expanded to help people understand how Microsoft Syntex might be a valuable toolset. But as part of the output, it gives you information about how to improve your information architecture. You need to be at least a SharePoint Admin to run the scanner, so running it for your Site Owners is a way to give them a gift to improve their content and its structure.