“Zero-Touch Provisioning is the ability to configure a laptop, phone, or tablet over-the-air from anywhere on the planet. And it’s a hot topic right now.”

Zero-Touch Provisioning achieves three things for your business when implemented properly:

  1. Simplifies device lifecycle management

  2. Reduces device overhead and related infrastructure

  3. Increases ease of use for your employees

The first two reasons are enough to explore this technology. Zero-Touch provides hard and soft cost reduction. Hard costs come in the form of server infrastructure and VPN licenses while soft costs come from freeing up IT helpdesks and administrators who no longer maintain and deploy devices.

There’s a wealth of research on these first two, but I haven’t come across a lot of information focusing on the effect of Zero-Touch Provisioning on employee experience.

Let’s go through some benefits for your employees:

 

Ti-i-iiime is on your side

I hope you sang that….

Indeed, the first benefit is time. We get to work with a lot of great companies at Mobile Mentor, but one consistent experience we witness is a delay of up to a week for a laptop to be received by a new employee.

Behind this delay is often the need for IT to receive and provision the laptop before delivering it to the employee. Sometimes this dove tails with other orientation activities but, regardless, it means that employees often do not have time to receive their laptop (and phone) and begin making it their own.

A Zero-Touch Provisioned laptop can be sent directly to an employee, letting them experience the joy of taking a brand-new machine out of the box. Furthermore, employees can receive their laptop sooner because the IT workload has been eliminated.

Having a device on day one is a major stress point for employees. Providing it to them gives them time to become familiar with how their new employer works and feel like they are valued and part of the team.

What about used laptops?

Well, it turns out that Zero-Touch Provisioning makes resetting a machine easy. It can also be done over-the-air from anywhere on the planet. If you have employee turn-over, re-setting a machine can be done remotely and doesn’t require returning it to IT.

That brings me to my next point.

Device replacement is lightning fast

 

Can your company deliver a 1-hour replacement
for a dropped or broken device?

 

You can with Zero-Touch Provisioning.

With Zero-Touch Provisioning you can set up a local buffer stock, away from central IT, and have a loaner device ready for such an emergency. Because of the way Zero-Touch Provisioning technology works, if you need to set up a new laptop or phone you only need to sign in on a new device. After that, your profile, apps, and configurations, and even documents, are downloaded and available on your new device. Set-up time may vary but so long as your internet isn’t held together with duct tape and hope, it can usually be completed in under an hour.

Losing a phone or a laptop is extremely stressful. Being able to provide someone with a loaner or replacement device in under an hour is real win and will be greatly appreciated. It even applies to BYOD.

Grab ‘em if you want ‘em App Store

 

“Hello IT? Yeah, I’d like to have this app installed.

OK so two days? Got it.    …Ugh.”

 

In any company, there are going to be apps that should be installed by default (looking at you Microsoft Word). But there are also apps that some users want and others will not.

Maybe not everyone needs to get the web conferencing tool, and some may not need or want apps like Power BI, Firefox or Microsoft Edge.

That said, if your IT has reviewed an app and found it acceptable, toss it in the app store.

Now your users can use self-service and grab all the additional apps they want. This gives control back to your users and that’s always a good thing.

As a bonus, this also frees up your IT staff to focus on innovation instead of mundane tasks, something they will appreciate.

Get Zero-Touch for your business

Mobile Mentor has been implementing Zero-Touch Provisioning on mobile devices for nearly a decade. And now Windows has joined the party we can help you manage all your devices.

Contact us today to learn how your company can improve your employee experience with Zero-Touch, you’ll never look back!

Shane Sloan

Shane is our Vice President of Products and Innovation our managed service line of business as well as our enterprise Intune migration program. Shane is a graduate of Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management with a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA). Prior to joining Mobile Mentor, Shane spent 9 years at AIG’s Life Insurance division focused on development, automation engineering and quality assurance leadership. In 2007, Shane obtained a Bachelor’s of Science in Information Technology from Colorado Technical University. Prior to undergrad, Shane had a distinguished career with the US Army as a Blackhawk helicopter crew chief.