How Are Smart Homes and PC Support Alike?

Running a business is like running a household. There just aren’t enough hours in a day to complete everything we want to get done. For most, the goal is to minimize the time we spend on mundane day-to-day tasks so we can maximize the remaining time.

When the “Internet of things” came on the scene, my family turned to home automation to help us streamline certain areas of our personal lives. We started with a doorbell and then got a smart thermostat. We could see who was at the door and program our A/C from afar – which was cool, but I didn’t feel the full impact until we took the time to fully connect these smart solutions and utilize all the things they could do.

As we added more smart devices, our home automation really took off. We had fun with it. I made more ice remotely (handy when my son had marching band practice outside in the Texas heat), and I rang the remote dinner bell at mealtime (a family favorite). But the true automation began when I set up our household routines like turning down the thermostat at night, locking the doors and setting alarms. And even better – when the devices recognized my regular habit patterns, the system prompted me to see if I wanted to automate additional routines I hadn’t even considered.

Though somewhat trivial, these repetitive tasks took time. And as our home got smarter, it made me realize how many of those “just a minute” minutes were adding up in my day.

In my work life, I’m a product manager for ProSupport Plus for PCs, Dell Technologies’ flagship support service for businesses. I’ve noticed that when I talk to IT leaders and support desk managers, they often feel that same kind of ongoing burden maintaining and supporting PCs for hundreds or thousands of employees. Those repetitive tasks – checking for outdated drivers and pushing updates, getting system data, maintaining ongoing security and more – bog down the IT staff and the end users. And doing so for all their devices compounds the time it takes.

That’s why we added automation into our support capabilities. In addition to expert break/fix repair, issue alerting and the ever-popular accident coverage, our ProSupport Plus service plan helps with proactive and predictive issue resolution. IT admins can connect to our technology, SupportAssist for Business PCs, to automate tasks across their PC fleets via a cloud console – significantly reducing the administrative time for IT managers.

In a recent report from Principled Technologies, hands-on testing found device driver and firmware updates could be pushed to an entire fleet in as little as 37 seconds using the automation capabilities of ProSupport Plus for PCs. And additionally, organizations could save up to 641 hours of admin time annually on recurring tasks for a 1000-device fleet. That’s a lot of time that could be reallocated toward working on other projects. Why would you want more time in your day? Said no one, ever.

Beyond the time savings aspect, the automation benefits of our PC support are remarkably like the ones my family enjoys at home too – productivity, safety, ongoing security, awareness, convenience of remotely keeping tabs on things from anywhere.

Automation – both at home and at work – helps free us up from an endless cycle of tasks, saving time and giving us peace of mind. Often, the technology is already there in the product and we just need to tap into it. Your account rep or Service Account Manager can help you take advantage of automation with ProSupport Plus for PCs. Make your day better with automation.

Source: dell.com