By Tom Paquin

Here at the Future of Field Service, we love talking about new product implementation, integration, and rollout, but we realize that represents a very small percentage of the day-to-day life of service IT. The meat of IT interactions happen in the moments in between those large scale implementations; Maintenance, onboarding, and off-boarding of employees onto the various systems that run your service practice. Right alongside those big implementations, these day-to-day operations are changing too. 

The Dawn of New IT

With the many technical advancements disrupting every area of service, it’s easy to forget about how technology impacts some of those top-level areas of IT, as well. These technical advancements, along with changing perspectives about the role of IT holistically, have led to the coining and conceptualization of what we like to call New IT. So—what is New IT, and how does it differ from, uh, old IT?In short, the way that I like to think about New IT is as the democratization of Information Technology. While traditional IT forces a top-down approach to the way maintenance is handled, New IT puts the power, and expectations of onborading and maintenance into the hands of the user. With the advent of cloud, fast connections, and remote device management, IT professionals should be interacting with end users as little as possible. In field operations, where employees should be remote 99% of the time, this is even more imperative. This allows and IT staff to focus on bigger, broader strategic initiatives that are more worthy of their time.Let's use onboarding as an example. Ideally, IT should not even have to unwrap the packaging on a new employee’s devices in order to get them up and running. Modern device management starts at the OEM, and is visible in a cloud-controlled database, so the computer leaves the assembly line with the employee's credentials ready to be configured. This logic invariably extends to your FSM software, which should be managed and deployed in the cloud for ease of integration into a New IT workflow. Moreover, a solution should be chosen that is configurable, modular, and frictionless for updates, maintenance, and management. If you're an IT professional, you might be wondering how you stack up, so we've created a short quiz to test your "New IT" IQ. It'll help you see how you stack up against the most mature of Field Service firms. Check it out below: