Two weeks ago Citrix announced the release of Dazzle (formerly known as Project Anthem) during Citrix Synergy. There was a lot of buzz - first about the name and then about the capabilities - but the main theme here was centered around putting "the personal back in computing", where it is really driving more of the on-demand concept as it relates to putting the power in the user's hands. Dazzle is, as Citrix puts it, the self-service "storefront" for your enterprise apps. The capabilities this puts in an administrator's hands now to "over-publish" and be able to provide the end user the basic applications they need to be productive, but then offer a way to request applications beyond that is very smart. We all know that we don't want users out there picking every app because they can, so there are some ways to build in an approval process that managers will have to approve or deny the request, but this goes a long way in removing some of that tedious work admins have to do when adding a new application and user to the farm.
“Every day, employees are presented with an amazing array of exciting apps and services on the web that spark their imagination and put them in full control of their experience. Then they come to work, and their IT experience is mandated by a bland ‘general issue’ sameness that threatens to drive every ounce of productivity and innovation out of them,” said Mark Templeton, president and CEO, Citrix Systems. “Now, for the first time ever, we’re giving IT a tool that helps them truly ‘dazzle’ end users with an ultra cool, self-service storefront, empowering employees to select the apps, desktops and services they need, whenever they need them. The hidden reality, of course, is that by giving employees the choice they so desperately want, IT actually saves a ton of money and gains even more control over the things that really matter.
How Dazzle Works
"Dazzle is a user-facing application that runs on any Windows or Mac computer. It essentially acts as a lightweight storefront for all the applications IT has centrally staged in head-end infrastructure products like XenApp. To select an application in Dazzle, users simply browse and search based on application name, description, or type. They can also choose applications based on IT-defined categories such as functional department or group name. Selecting an application is as simple as clicking an icon in Windows, or dragging it into the Applications folder or Dock on a Mac. Organizing selected applications into user-defined “playlists” is equally simple and intuitive, giving Windows users full control over how apps will appear in their Start menu. Apps available for offline use are clearly designated in the Dazzle console, making selection easy for laptop users who need to work while disconnected from the network."
Beyond the Storefront
Very cool right? Let's take Dazzle a few steps beyond just providing a storefront for users to get the apps and content they need to do their day-to-day jobs. How can this new user interface help IT more? IT has always struggled with metrics and benchmarking to measure its value to the business. It's a simple concept really; measure the right things and business thrives; monitor the wrong things and you just might have an utter disaster on your hands. It's safe to say that there is no single set of benchmarks that works for every company or even for the same organization sometimes. Companies can't just apply a plain vanilla template like Balanced Scorecard or Six Sigma to their organizations. If they do, they are only applying metrics and benchmarks that are someone else's. So how does Dazzle fit into this conversation? Dazzle has the ability to be customized in some of the panes on the interface. Here is where IT can develop custom surveys to poll the end user community and gather important data on how technology is being used. There are many other metrics that IT organizations use to measure and monitor performance, but it's critical to understand that some of these only provide a snapshot rather than a complete picture. I've stated it before, IT must understand where it fits in. I've seen organizations completely miss the big picture. They were "off the charts" successful in hitting their metrics, but the IT organization as a whole was a complete mess. There was a complete disconnect between the business needs and IT performance.
In order to be successful, IT must look at things from different angles - and use different metrics - in order to understand if it is getting consistent readings. Unfortunately, many IT organizations lack the "outside-in" view that is necessary to build a solid foundation for metrics. We are all guilty sometimes of a skewed viewpoint of business, and worse yet, we in IT are so busy running on the hamster wheel that we aren't making any strategic progress. I'm not saying that using Dazzle is going to solve all of these problems, no way. But what it will do is allow IT organizations to stay in tune with what the end user community thinks and to capture data relative to metrics needed to measure the success of IT.
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