One of my colleagues, Ben Goodman, wrote a great post on the VMware end-user computing blog that essentially says “pay attention to your users”.  Okay, he titled it “what rogue users and cloud services can tell IT”, but my little researcher heart went pitter-pat when I read the post and saw that it was all about listening to your users.

Consider this paragraph:

Each time employees make a decision to choose a cloud service outside of the IT department, it’s an opportunity for IT to learn where those users are being underserved and to develop solutions that do fit the enterprise security, governance, and compliance requirements. So, in that sense, rogue services are a great opportunity for IT and they need to see it that way. Instead of looking at these service, tools and devices as unwanted invaders, IT needs to see them as what they are, leading indicators of their real customers’ needs.

And he’s totally right.  Pay attention to what your users are actually using, and you’ll learn a lot about what they need, what they want, and what hoops they’re willing to jump through to get what they want.  This will help you provide better IT services, better software, and a better user experience.