Productivity Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/productivity/ Software Asset Management. Simplified. Fri, 05 Sep 2025 10:35:15 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://easysam.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/easysam_icon-60x60.png Productivity Archives - EasySAM https://easysam.co.uk/tag/productivity/ 32 32 UK government trial of Microsoft 365 Copilot reveals no clear productivity boost https://easysam.co.uk/news/uk-government-trial-of-microsoft-365-copilot-reveals-no-clear-productivity-boost/ Fri, 05 Sep 2025 10:32:37 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=35836 The results saw a mix of negligible time savings and lower quality work - with the overriding concern being Copilot's cost effectiveness.

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The results saw a mix of negligible time savings and lower quality work - with the overriding concern being Copilot's cost effectiveness.

Published on 5th September 2025

A recent three-month trial of Microsoft’s M365 Copilot within a UK government department has found no definitive evidence of improved productivity, despite some promising results for specific tasks.

The Department for Business and Trade conducted the pilot from October to December 2024, distributing 1,000 licences primarily to volunteers, with 30% randomly selected participants.

About 300 participants consented to data analysis, enabling the department to assess the tool’s impact on work efficiency, output quality, and user satisfaction.

While M365 Copilot showed potential in speeding up certain activities – most notably writing emails, summarising meetings and creating report summaries – the quality and accuracy of outputs varied significantly depending on the task.

Users completed email writing and report summaries faster and with higher quality compared to non-users, although the time saved for email writing was reported as minimal.

Conversely, tasks such as Excel data analysis and PowerPoint slide creation were completed slower or produced lower-quality results with M365 Copilot.

Specifically, PowerPoint slide production was over seven minutes faster on average but required corrections due to inferior quality. Data analysis in Excel also took longer and was less accurate among Copilot users, contradicting diary study data that suggested possible time savings.

No clear link between time savings and productivity gains

While some time savings were identified, the assessment found no conclusive evidence that these led to measurable productivity improvement. The department acknowledged this limitation, citing that productivity impact was not the main focus of the evaluation and that further data would be needed to verify such claims.

Usage statistics revealed relatively low engagement with Copilot features. On average, each user performed just over one Copilot action per working day (1.14 actions) out of 63 working days in the trial.

Applications like Word, Teams and Outlook saw the most use, while Loop and OneNote usage remained below 3% daily. PowerPoint and Excel usage peaked with about 7% of license holders utilising Copilot features on any given day.

Positive user satisfaction

Despite modest usage rates, user satisfaction was generally positive. Overall, 72% of participants expressed satisfaction or high satisfaction with M365 Copilot, and many were disappointed when the trial ended.

The trial yielded a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 31, considered a good rating, indicating that many users appreciated the tool for routine administrative activities and felt it allowed them to redirect time toward more strategic or valuable work, such as training or breaks.

However, the trial highlights concerns about cost-effectiveness. With commercial M365 Copilot licenses ranging between £4.90 and £18.10 per user per month depending on the business plan, the expense for extensive government deployment could become substantial considering the relatively limited use observed.

The Department for Business and Trade is continuing to analyse environmental impacts and return on investment to better understand the tool’s overall value.

“The evaluation findings will feed into a series of internal recommendations and next steps. Further evaluation is needed to assess the value for money and environmental impact of M365 Copilot usage in the department,” the report says.

Source

https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/uk-government-trial-of-microsoft-365-copilot-reveals-no-clear-productivity-boost

Image Credit

Microsoft

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]]> How endpoint visibility trims IT costs and boosts performance https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/how-endpoint-visibility-trims-it-costs-and-boosts-performance/ Fri, 08 Sep 2023 10:38:15 +0000 https://easysam.co.uk/?p=28396 Enhance IT efficiency through endpoint visibility - cutting wasteful spend while in turn boosting productivity.

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Enhance IT efficiency through endpoint visibility - cutting wasteful spend while in turn boosting productivity.

Published on 8th September 2023

Post-COVID, the hybrid work model has proven that it is here to stay. Many organizations have invested in digital workplace tools, such as cloud-based productivity apps and digital collaboration tools, to accommodate a radically evolving work environment. These tools ensure workers stay connected with colleagues, increase efficiency, and work seamlessly on-site and off-premises.

In this new normal, CIOs have been challenged to enhance the employee experience (EX) while keeping expenditures in check. This is particularly important in the current economic climate. The good news is that many areas have room to slash costs without impacting performance – CIOs just have to identify and eliminate wasteful spend.

Poor Visibility Obscures Needless Spending

There are many causes of wasteful IT spend, especially for larger corporations with massive IT budgets. Ultimately, though, four key factors generally drive excessive IT costs today:

  • Outdated hardware: When devices become slow, they can hinder employee productivity. However, organizations are often unsure whether to upgrade their existing devices or perform a company-wide hardware refresh, as they need insight into device performance. Replacing devices prematurely, especially when tight budgets, can result in unnecessary IT expenses, mainly if the organization is dealing with more pressing employee experience issues.
  • Inefficient license management: With the rise of hybrid work, companies are increasingly subscribing to more applications, leading to significant wasted spend due to poor license management. A recent studyOpens a new window shows that unused software licenses cost companies $537 million yearly. This is often caused by a need for more visibility into subscriptions or maintaining active subscriptions to prevent data loss.
  • Need for issue resolution: IT teams who rely on manual processes without AI or automation cannot handle their workload effectively and need additional support personnel to maintain current service levels. In addition, using unproductive tools wastes engineers’ time and increases IT support costs.
  • Shadow IT costs: Shadow IT refers to unauthorized applications, software, devices, and other IT assets not approved by the IT department. Since Shadow IT cannot be monitored and often goes undetected, its costs cannot be controlled.
Although these issues may appear distinct, they all ultimately stem from a shared problem: insufficient visibility into organizational endpoints.

Endpoint Visibility Unveils Hidden, Wasteful IT Expenditures

Better visibility is central to identifying and eliminating wasteful IT spend. There are many unified endpoint management (UEM) platforms for this purpose. IT employs UEM solutions to manage and monitor all the company’s end-user devices from a centralized location. Since employees have gone fully or partially remote during the COVID-19 pandemic, IT administrators have continued to rely on their existing UEM platforms to provision employee devices remotely.

However, these technologies weren’t designed for today’s hybrid work world, leading to inevitable problems. In short, these technologies do not offer the necessary visibility to uncover hidden endpoints and IT assets, such as desktop computers and mobile devices (bountiful in employees’ homes). This lack of visibility into endpoints increases resolution time per ticket, thus increasing the cost per ticket. This has all sorts of cascading effects: Hardware refresh costs go up since the planned refresh of hardware under warranty is not visible. The cost incurred for licensed software becomes higher compared to the actual usage of the software.

In the current environment, merely tracking metrics and static details is insufficient. IT teams require more endpoint insight to map out these complex, highly distributed hybrid settings accurately. That means they need tools to connect metrics and the employee experience. The answer is solutions that provide automatic endpoint mapping capabilities and deliver contextual details to IT teams.

Better Visibility With Automatic Endpoint Mapping

End-user experience monitoring (EUEM) software employs AI to automatically map every enterprise endpoint, reducing the complexity and burden of manual processes. These tools use a lightweight agent deployed on all end-user devices to gather telemetry data, presented on a user-friendly dashboard for analysis. With these insights, IT teams can monitor every IT software and hardware asset across the enterprise while swiftly identifying flaws and abnormalities to prioritize upgrade initiatives. Auto-remediation at the endpoint can further streamline the user experience by preventing IT issues from disrupting their workday without involving help or service desk personnel.

Endpoint visibility through EUEM software can provide IT teams with insights that can help them make informed investments and reduce operational expenses. One key benefit of endpoint visibility is the ability to optimize hardware lifecycles. For instance, if an IT administrator cannot determine the root cause of low device performance or repeated application crashes, they may decide to upgrade or replace the device prematurely. With endpoint visibility, IT teams can determine whether a replacement or upgrade is necessary.

Additionally, endpoint visibility allows IT teams to track all enterprise licenses and identify which ones have been unused for an extended period. They can then create alerts to deactivate those licenses, resulting in cost savings that can be used to enhance the hybrid work model. Auto-remediation at the endpoint, without requiring software development personnel to be involved, can also streamline the user experience by preventing IT issues from disrupting the workday.

EUEM’s advanced visibility can benefit enterprises of all types. For instance, imagine a bank manager having trouble accessing a database hosted offsite. EUEM technology can quickly pinpoint exactly where the issue lies – the employee’s device, the WiFi router or the database software itself. The rapid resolution of the problem minimizes the disruption, allowing the worker to focus on delivering value rather than troubleshooting.

Here’s another example: Consider industries with highly seasonal flows of users to onboard and offboard, such as universities, hospitality, and retail. Even simple actions such as new user account creation, allocating laptops, issuing badges, and managing permissions can become massive time-eaters when multiplied by hundreds or thousands. However, accurate endpoint visibility and smart automation can simplify joining and leaving processes while improving efficiency and reducing manual overhead.

Cutting IT Costs Without Harming Productivity

With the economy stuck in a temporary rough patch, enterprises are mandating that CIOs freeze or curtail their department’s spending. IT operations are very different in today’s hybrid work world compared to the traditional workplace of yesteryear. That means the tools and strategies for reducing IT spend are also different. By utilizing intelligent EUEM software to achieve end-to-end visibility into each endpoint, organizations can shrink IT expenses without eliminating the services and systems employees need to do their jobs effectively and productively.

Source

https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/it-strategy/guest-article/how-endpoint-visibility-trims-it-costs-and-boosts-performance/

Image Credit

Carlos Muza via Unsplash

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]]> How to proactively manage shadow IT https://easysam.co.uk/knowledge-base/how-to-proactively-manage-shadow-it/ Fri, 23 Apr 2021 15:31:00 +0000 https://wptest.easysam.co.uk/?p=17631 Universities can reduce and secure shadow IT without impeding productivity.

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Universities can reduce and secure shadow IT without impeding productivity.

Published on 23rd April 2021

Shadow IT, the practice of using applications and systems without the explicit approval or knowledge of IT staff, is a growing challenge in higher education. The pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption not only at the enterprise level but also at the user level, increasing the likelihood that shadow IT will proliferate.

The Everest Group reported in 2019 that the cost of dismantling shadow IT accounted for 50 percent or more of IT spending in large enterprises. And shadow IT is as much a problem in higher education as in other industries — perhaps even more so, given the diversity of higher education user groups and its relatively open IT environment.

Shadow IT Can Be a Slippery Slope

Shadow IT grows because of a lack of awareness, both on the part of users and the IT department. A wide variety of tools are brought into institutions under the radar, without explicit IT approval or knowledge.

A user needs something to get the job done and, without thinking, signs up for a web-based application: Need online messaging? Why not the same WhatsApp you use for your personal life? Want to do a VoIP or videoconference call? If you don’t love the videoconference solution your institution offers, why not just use the free version of Zoom you use at home? Need to transmit large files? It’s easy to sign up for a Dropbox account, particularly when you’re trying to get the job done remotely.

But in none of these scenarios is any thought given to control, management or security. Self-reliance is often a virtue, but not when it puts the university at risk.

The IT department may be blind to the issue, with no clue about how many unauthorized apps are being used, particularly when those applications are connecting from a home office.

It’s often unclear what security protections the applications are using, and frequent reuse of login credentials, weak passwords and phishing attacks leave user accounts on unauthorized services vulnerable.

With shadow IT, there is also the problem of application confusion and oversaturation. It’s messy when people are deciding for themselves which messaging application or file-sharing service to use.

How to Protect Against Unauthorized Access

Unauthorized software may not meet the security standards required by the institution. There are several categories of risk that need to be considered:

  • Data protection issues: Where is the data being stored? How is it protected? Can the user upload sensitive data to the cloud, where it could be leaked? Is data encrypted? Who controls the encryption keys? Can the user download files that contain malware and spread them to other members of the team?
  • Compliance: The university’s compliance efforts may be squandered if the actual state of software is unknown. Will use of the service put the institution in conflict with industry regulations or even laws?
  • Software asset management: Licenses procured without IT knowledge expose the institution to risk, potentially with severe sanctions. How do unknown applications and data relationships affect the carefully populated configuration management database?

How to Develop Proactive Prevention

Fortunately, the sea of shadow IT is not as murky as it may seem. The best approach involves five steps:

  • Establish a baseline of acceptable applications. Recognize there are probably many instances of shadow IT in your institution, most of which use well-known tools such as mail, messaging, conferencing and large file transfer services. Focus on the most popular ones and determine if you can sanction a subset of them.
  • Clarify the policy. Establish a clear policy on which devices, systems and software your faculty, staff and students can use. Communicate that policy to all users — not just once, but often. Remember that consistent user education strengthens your first line of defence.
  • Gain visibility. Detect and catalog all software running in the organization by using a software asset management solution, such as an asset management suite. This can integrate compliance, license entitlement, discovery and more in one interface.
  • Triage unacceptable risk. Conduct a detailed analysis of the risks associated with unauthorized applications. A cloud access security broker, such as McAfee MVISION, ensures real-time data protection. For tighter control with virtual desktop infrastructure tools such as Citrix XenDesktop, let IT control a secure desktop image with only sanctioned applications.
  • Create a long-term plan to fill functionality gaps. Run strategic analysis of usage patterns. Recognize that the institution needs a full range of tools and services to function properly.

Students, faculty and staff are constantly trying to work as efficiently as possible, particularly when they are doing so away from campus. It’s up to IT to provide them with secure solutions that make this easier.

Shadow IT is a problem, but it serves one good purpose: It provides a view of what capabilities users really need, while software asset management, virtual desktop infrastructure and cloud access security brokers can help IT exercise control and governance over the entire landscape of applications. As always, user education plays a key role.

Source

https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2021/03/how-proactively-manage-shadow-it

Image Credit

Thom via Unsplash

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