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Reducing IT costs using personalized automatic repair Published May, 2015 Common computer issues can directly impact employee productivity. Over time, they can also significantly degrade the user experience and negatively impact an organization's bottom line. To address these issues and add business value, Microsoft IT created My Microsoft IT (MMIT), an application that increases user productivity and reduces the burden and cost on the Help Desk and other IT resources. MMIT uses contextual computing to automate various troubleshooters that identify and fix common issues on users' computers. The application also provides a self-service dashboard where users can monitor and optimize the health of their computers without IT or Help Desk involvement. Situation Microsoft IT needed a way to automate the resolution of common issues so that users could feel relief from the pain of computer-related productivity impacts, allowing the users more time to focus on their work and providing value to the business. Solution Microsoft IT developed the MMIT application to run on users' computers and alert them to issues that it detects. With minimal user interaction, MMIT then uses built-in troubleshooters to fix issues and restore user productivity. MMIT also includes a dashboard where users can proactively monitor and manage their computer's health. Benefits User feedback and analytics Productivity gains Context-sensitive IT experiences Optimized IT efficiency and risk

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Reducing IT costs using personalized automatic repairPublished May, 2015

Common computer issues can directly impact employee productivity. Over time, they can also significantly degrade the user experience and negatively impact an organization's bottom line. To address these issues and add business value, Microsoft IT created My Microsoft IT (MMIT), an application that increases user productivity and reduces the burden and cost on the Help Desk and other IT resources. MMIT uses contextual computing to automate various troubleshooters that identify and fix common issues on users' computers. The application also provides a self-service dashboard where users can monitor and optimize the health of their computers without IT or Help Desk involvement.

Situation

Microsoft IT needed a way to automate the resolution of common issues so that users could feel relief from the pain of computer-related productivity impacts, allowing the users more time to focus on their work and providing value to the business.

Solution

Microsoft IT developed the MMIT application to run on users' computers and alert them to issues that it detects. With minimal user interaction, MMIT then uses built-in troubleshooters to fix issues and restore user productivity. MMIT also includes a dashboard where users can proactively monitor and manage their computer's health.

Benefits

User feedback and analytics

Productivity gains

Fewer Help Desk calls

Context-sensitive IT experiences

Optimized IT efficiency and risk control

Cost-saving, mobile-era support model

Products and Technology

My Microsoft IT app

Microsoft Azure Cloud

Windows PowerShell

Windows Client operating systems

Application Insights for Visual Studio Online

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SituationMicrosoft IT is responsible for for making employees as productive as possible wherever they might be working. The number of device types in the enterprise has increased dramatically in recent years, and user expectations are increasingly diverse in a mobile-first, cloud-first world and the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) era of modern computing. These changes have led to a variety of new challenges for IT. One of those challenges is the timely resolution of issues that slow down or even completely halt users' work.

Microsoft employees often reported issues with common user operations. The issues ranged from networking issues to hardware or software issues. Typical issues could include applications that stop responding, a microphone or other device that fails to function, or various popup messages informing the user of a delay or problem with a running application. Depending on the user and the situation, an issue could be tolerated for days or weeks before the user resolved it, if the issue was resolved at all. The productivity loss resulting from these delays conflicted with IT’s goal of supporting business efficiency, so IT realized that they needed to better understand the situation.

When experiencing computer issues, Microsoft IT found that users responded in a variety of ways. Some users called the Microsoft Help Desk to learn the correct steps to remedy the problem. Others relied on their associations with other employees who had experienced similar issues, and typically reached out to those coworkers for help before pursuing other resolution options. Many others considered the issues to be too minor to seek resolution, and would simply tolerate the delays or other inconveniences, and continue working in spite of them.

The challenges here impacted IT and users. For Microsoft IT Help Desk, each support call represents a cost to Microsoft in terms of resource time that was spent resolving issues. For users, the delay for people, multiplied by the more than 100,000 users that IT supports, added up to a massive loss of productivity across the enterprise, which was measurable in the millions of dollars. From an IT perspective, the challenge was to add business value by identifying the most commonly occurring issues and determining the most immediate way of resolving them for each user.

IT also sought a method to make fixes applicable to more than one user at a time. In most cases, the resolutions that IT provided only benefitted the individual employee who reported the issue, and IT knew that there were fixes for common issues that could benefit employees company-wide.

Breakdown of productivity and opportunity losses

For the purposes of this project, Microsoft IT measured productivity losses as the average user's hourly cost to the business multiplied by the time lost. Time lost is calculated as the sum of the following:

System-based delays – the added time that is required to perform tasks on the user's computer because of the issue, multiplied by the number of days or weeks that the user tolerates the issue before seeking resolution.

User-based issue-related delays – the time that the user spends resolving the issue, including investigating the issue, trying ad hoc fixes, asking team members for advice, researching issue resolution, and engaging the Help Desk.

Colleague-based issue-related delays – the time that a user's colleagues spend helping to resolve the issue.

Help Desk engagement-time losses – the time that the Help Desk personnel spend helping to resolve the user's issue.

In addition to productivity losses, Microsoft IT also considered opportunity losses as part of its value equation for the project. Unlike productivity losses, which measure the time that would otherwise have been spent by the user conducting business, opportunity losses measure the new business impact that the user could have attained with the lost time. Opportunity losses can be difficult to quantify, but are still a significant factor when you examine business losses due to users having to resolve trivial issues. IT measures opportunity cost by calculating lost productivity multiplied by a "value uplift over cost"

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factor. For example, a value uplift over cost of 30 percent means that an employees' value to their organization is on average 30 percent greater than the amount it costs the organization to retain them.

Relative costs to resolve issues

The measurable impact of issue resolution tactics is clearest when productivity and opportunity losses are viewed on a cost spectrum. As shown in Figure 1, a Help Desk call is typically considered the most expensive resolution tactic for common issues. The more self-service or automated the resolution tactic, the lower the cost of resolution. Fully automated issue resolution is the lowest-cost tactic.

Figure 1. The spectrum of user issue-resolution tactics from most expensive to least expensive.

The business cost of a Help Desk call reflects not only the engagement time of the Help Desk personnel, but also the lost productivity of the user during the call. This cost is increased when an issue requires a complex description by the user, research on the part of the Help Desk personnel, and time to communicate a detailed resolution to the user. User fixes (without the assistance of Help Desk) similarly impact productivity to varying degrees based on how simple or complex the issues are.

Because automation is the most effective to quickly resolve the issue for the user, it is the ultimate goal. With automation, user interaction is kept to a minimum, or is even at zero. The computer itself detects the presence and nature of the issue, and then takes steps to resolve the issue on the user's behalf.

SolutionMicrosoft IT developed MMIT, an application that includes a set of automatic troubleshooters that resolve common PC issues. MMIT runs on a user's computer, recognizes when an issue occurs, and automatically starts a troubleshooter to help the user resolve the issue. MMIT also serves as a tool for educating users about the ways that they can monitor their computers' system health and resolve some common issues on their own.

The MMIT project began with only a few troubleshooters but has grown to comprise more than 35 troubleshooters. By analyzing usage metrics, IT observed that the troubleshooters are now running on users' systems throughout the company at a rate of tens of thousands of times per month.

In addition to being an integrated troubleshooter platform, the application provides a dashboard that users can open anytime to view the following:

Direct access to user support resources, including Help Desk (Lync-based) and Tech Link (in-person) issue resolution teams that are local to the user's geographic location.

Self-service issue resolution options, including troubleshooter scripts that users can run themselves, system health best practices, and links to the Microsoft IT internal portal.

Diagnostic and reporting tools, including dashboard icons and other user interface items to track hardware, software, network, security, and system startup and backup details.

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Figure 2 shows the MMIT dashboard and the various actions that users can take proactively to monitor their computer's health and resolve common issues.

Figure 2. The MMIT dashboard.

In addition to providing access to tasks, the MMIT dashboard includes a troubleshooter control panel where users can opt in or out of various MMIT automated actions.

Contextual awareness and contextual computing

A primary driver in designing MMIT was the concept of using contextual computing to improve the relevancy of the data required to fix common issues. Contextual computing is the combination of devices and services that operate on a deep understanding of end-user environments to create a tailored, highly-targeted user experience. MMIT uses contextual awareness—the knowledge and understanding of a user's system, including not only its contents, but also its geographic location and the times when it’s used for various activities—to collect contextual data that expedites issue resolution.

Using contextual awareness, MMIT automates fixes to well-known, common issues that were previously not automated because the contextual data was not collected. MMIT detects when a user encounters an issue that it recognizes, and then proactively performs the troubleshooting steps that are necessary using the known resolution for the issue combined with the contextual data about the user's system. Depending on the nature of the issue, the user can be notified and asked to run the troubleshooter, or the issue detection and resolution can happen without user interaction or awareness.

MMIT works by collecting the following contextual data elements about the user's computer:

Network identity information, including the host name and the user's domain and credentials.

The name and exact version number of the operating system, and the presence of any updates.

The manufacturer’s name and model name of the computer.

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Detailed system specifications, including the system type, BIOS version and date, wireless information, and video cards and drivers.

Exact version numbers of commonplace desktop applications, including Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Lync.

MMIT also uses this contextual data to help expedite communications between a user and the Help Desk on a typical call. When a user contacts Help Desk, MMIT can transmit the contextual data to the Help Desk personnel, saving the time it would otherwise take for the Help Desk to gather the information from the user.

As it developed MMIT, Microsoft IT considered contextual awareness to be particularly important in an increasingly mobile IT world. Modern mobile solutions are expected to provide powerful business computing capabilities as well as consistent computing experiences across platforms and devices. The inclusion of contextual computing in MMIT provides a basis for keeping pace with user issues that require specific device knowledge to achieve a resolution.

Implementing the troubleshooters

To begin the process of determining the issues it could resolve proactively using troubleshooters, Microsoft IT followed a list of criteria. IT started with its list of commonly occurring computer issues, ranked each in order of the issue's impact on the user, frequency of occurrence, and ease of solution development. Some of this information was gained by reporting on Help Desk ticket data, but most of it was found by talking to key IT service managers and other IT personnel.

Each troubleshooter comprises a set of Windows PowerShell scripts. When MMIT detects a known issue on the user's system, it runs the troubleshooter to fix the issue. To increase the number of troubleshooters, Microsoft IT created a software development kit (SDK) to assist groups across Microsoft with troubleshooter development.

Microsoft IT determined that the best candidates for initial troubleshooter development were its remote connectivity technologies, used by mobile employees. The complexity of providing seamless corporate network access over wireless, telecommunications and cellular networks caused these solutions to produce frequent user issues. IT developed troubleshooters that addressed three of the most common remote connectivity scenarios, and a fourth troubleshooter that identified and resolved related virtual private network (VPN) configuration issues on the user's computer.

In addition to troubleshooter development, Microsoft IT built MMIT as a modern HTML5 application and certified it through the Microsoft IT Dev Center, a centralized, self-service portal that is used across the company for publishing internal Windows Phone, Windows Store, and SharePoint applications. The application uses a flexible model that allows IT to add functionality as systems evolve, and as new fixes are prioritized or discovered.

MMIT implementation began in 2011 with just a few troubleshooters so that IT could measure the effectiveness of the MMIT concept. Based on the success of those first troubleshooters, and motivated by the promise of additional cost savings, IT implemented more troubleshooters and continues to do so today.

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Figure 3. High-level MMIT troubleshooter architecture.

The release of Windows 8 in 2012 deepened the level of contextual data capabilities available for MMIT, and Microsoft IT improved the application by adding new troubleshooters that took even greater advantage of system-level data than before. The capabilities in Windows 8 also extended the ability of many troubleshooters to fix issues without any user involvement.

BenefitsProductivity and opportunity gains

Productivity is restored to employees, with significantly less burden on the Help Desk and other expensive IT resources. In IT we realized the following benefits:

71 percent solve rate for troubleshooters automated by MMIT

15,000 fewer Help Desk calls per month

The automated detection systems and troubleshooters in MMIT have led to a sharp reduction in system and user-based delays by eliminating the often convoluted, time-consuming, and error-prone process of expecting users to apply fixes themselves.

This reduction has yielded a significant savings for Microsoft IT. Data on specific cost savings cannot be shared here, but the positive outcome of each troubleshooter has been an order of magnitude larger than the savings shown in the 4,000-person company example detailed in Table 1.

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User feedback and analytics

As part of deploying MMIT, Microsoft IT included a feedback feature that invited users to indicate whether or not a troubleshooter fixed the specific issue on their computer.

The goal of gathering feedback was twofold: adding quality to the application by learning what users liked or didn't like about it, and measuring the success of the troubleshooters by calculating the amount of productivity and opportunity gains that were actualized from automated issue resolutions.

To gather feedback, Microsoft IT included a feedback question in a prominent user interface location after a fix was applied, asking the user to indicate whether a troubleshooter fixed the issue or not. IT stored and analyzed the responses to this question for each troubleshooter, and then used the data to make decisions about refining existing troubleshooters and determining new ones to develop. IT created the feedback feature and analytics capability using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Application Insights for Visual Studio Online.

Figure 4. MMIT usage analytics gathering process.

The feedback analytics also played a significant role in how the ongoing MMIT troubleshooter development project was funded. Like most IT departments, Microsoft IT was wary of spending time creating new applications that were of negligible, dubious, or unproven business value. By collecting user feedback on MMIT, IT could gauge the success of its troubleshooters and measure that success in a dollar value that potentially showed positive and immediate business impact. In this way, the cost of developing new fixes could be funded effectively using the savings that resulted from previous fixes.

For the analytics to be helpful, Microsoft IT needed to gather information about the efficacy of each individual troubleshooter. By understanding the time saving produced by the troubleshooter and multiplying that by the number of users affected by the fix, IT could generate benefit data in terms of the total number of productive hours gained. IT then could then multiply the hours gained times a value coefficient that it derived for the hourly productivity and opportunity value of an average employee to estimate the amount that the issue would cost the company if the troubleshooter were not used to resolve it.

Table 1 shows the methodology that Microsoft IT used for calculating productivity and opportunity values.

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Measurement Calculation ResultTR

OU

BLE

SH

OO

TER

SA

VIN

GS

Time saved by troubleshooter 2.1 minutes

Number of times the troubleshooter runs 40,000/year

Minutes gained per year 40,000 x 2.1 84,000 minutes

Hours gained per year 84,000 ÷ 60 1,400 hours

Days gained per year 1,400 ÷ 10 140 days

EM

PLO

YE

E V

ALU

E

Average employee annual cost to company $100,000

Number of employee work days per year 250

Fully-burdened employee cost $100,000 ÷ 250 $400 per day

Value uplift over employee burden cost 30%

Total employee value per day $400 + 30% $520

BEN

EFI

T

Annual savings per troubleshooter 140 days x $520 per day $72,800

Table 1. Troubleshooter productivity and opportunity savings per employee, using a fictitious business.

In the example shown, a single troubleshooter saves 2.1 minutes of productive time for all employees at a 4,000-person business that has an average employee annual cost of $100,000 over 250 working days. The calculation also allows for a 30% value uplift over cost (opportunity savings) for each employee, which represents the value added to the company by the employee above and beyond the company's cost to compensate the employee. The example assumes that each employee runs the troubleshooter an average of ten times during the year, for a total of 40,000 times annually.

The annual savings for one troubleshooter in the example totals $72,800. Depending on the size of the organization and the number of troubleshooters implemented, this annual savings can reach $1 million or even more. Microsoft IT expects that as new operating systems are released that contain added functionality, new opportunities for contextually fixing common issues will be revealed.

As more troubleshooters and other MMIT functionality are added, the efficiencies continue to improve.

Context-sensitive IT experiences

IT services are dynamically integrated in the user's context of using the computer, providing an improved user experience and a more comprehensive IT view of asset usage.

Contextual computing allows issues to be identified and resolved automatically and proactively on a per-user basis. By understanding key information about each asset—who uses the computer, where the user is located, what software is on the computer, and details about the most recent user activity—MMIT can deliver a solution programmatically that previously required user (and often IT or Help Desk) interaction.

The benefits of contextual awareness in MMIT is not limited to the troubleshooters. For example, when a user clicks Get Support in MMIT to find information about an in-person Microsoft IT support desk, the application provides a list of the nearest locations based

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on the geolocation data on the user's computer. MMIT also plans on using the computer's clock data to inform the user whether each location is currently open, and when it will open if it is currently closed.

This assisted support model increases user satisfaction by improving the accuracy and specificity of IT guidance. MMIT also helps create a positive user experience by providing the modern application design that users expect on their computers and other devices.

Optimized IT efficiency and risk control

IT gains efficiency and manages business risk more effectively by transforming user issue resolution into an automated system that requires minimal user or IT interaction.

MMIT addresses a central IT-related pain point that is common to many business and finance groups at organizations of every size: enhancing user productivity and enabling better business decision- making while lowering the costs and risks of IT delivery overall. By reducing the risk of lost productivity and opportunity for the business groups that Microsoft IT supports, MMIT saves the businesses money and helps them work more efficiently. Also, MMIT analytics and reporting provide insights about the usability and efficacy of its troubleshooters, leading to newer and better fix deployments.

Cost-saving, mobile-era support model

MMIT achieves modern levels of user service by efficiently using contextual information and self-financing IT application life-cycle management.

By shifting issue resolution support from IT hands-on to self-service, and from self-service to automation—in instances where troubleshooters run without user interaction— MMIT provides a valuable new support model for Microsoft IT. Not only are users able to use their computers with fewer technical issues, but the MMIT dashboard also empowers them to monitor their systems and take action proactively when needed.

When an issue cannot be resolved by using a troubleshooter and the user has to engage the Help Desk, the availability of their system information expedites the interaction. IT has seen the average length of a Help Desk call shorten by more than two minutes since it implemented MMIT.

This development has the overall effect of putting IT and users on the same level in many aspects regarding computer health monitoring and management. As mobility, device ubiquity, and platform diversity become increasing challenges for IT and users alike, Microsoft IT expects that more of its functions will transform into this model of intelligent, contextual support.

Similarly, the democratic nature of the user feedback system makes IT development cycles more targeted and efficient. When users vote on MMIT effectiveness, Microsoft IT can focus on strategic improvements and value rather than funding and implementing projects with an uncertain productivity outcome. In this way, successive troubleshooter development projects achieve a compounded level of return on IT investment. Also, because the success of one troubleshooter makes it easy and cost-justified to develop the next one, the development cycles occur rapidly with minimal bureaucratic delay.

Best practicesSelect candidates for automated troubleshooters based on common occurrence and feasibility. Microsoft IT used data that it collected about the frequency with which common issues occurred among users, and then asked the following questions of each potential problem to determine its suitability for automation:

Is the issue common to a wide range of users? For maximum effectiveness, IT used Help Desk ticket reports to single out issues that were shown to affect the largest percentage of its users.

Does the issue have a recognizable signature? A signature is a system-level change or combination of changes by which MMIT can detect that the issue has occurred.

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Does the issue have a known resolution that can be programmatically applied? If so, a troubleshooter can be developed that performs the resolution in lieu of the user finding some other way to do it.

For many IT departments, this criteria-based determination can be preceded by a less scientific process—ask around to find out which IT personnel have a list of fixes that they apply on a regular basis. At first, the full inventory of known resolutions is not always apparent because individual personnel have gotten so accustomed to applying the fix that they haven't shared its characteristics with the larger team. For this reason, gathering requirements for an automated troubleshooting application can be a helpful process for two reasons: first, the IT organization can update its knowledge base to be shared team-wide and with other resources such as Help Desk, and second, IT can also target fixes that are uniquely problematic among the user base that the team supports.

Resources5 IT Strategies for App Creation and Delivery

The Productivity Engine

Using Modern Apps to Streamline and Standardize Business Processes

Related videosCampus Experience: A Case Study of Reimagining the Digital Assistant Using Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud Capabilities

For more informationFor more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Order Centre at (800) 933-4750. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to:

http://www.microsoft.comhttp://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-IT

© 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

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