A Lakeside Software White Paper

A Lakeside Software White Paper

Using SysTrack to Automate the Development and Management of Enterprise Personas

2 Using SysTrack to Automate the Development and Management of Enterprise Personas

Table of Contents

Background ................................................................................................................................................... 3

Why Use Personas? ...................................................................................................................................... 3

Lakeside Software’s SysTrack ........................................................................................................................ 4

Lakeside Software’s Approach to Persona Assessment ................................................................................ 5

Defining Workspaces and Personas .............................................................................................................. 6

Persona Banking Use Case ............................................................................................................................ 9

Project Requirements ............................................................................................................................... 9

The SysTrack Solution ............................................................................................................................. 11

Summary ..................................................................................................................................................... 13

For More Information ................................................................................................................................. 15


Background The days of IT being fully in control of information technology are behind us – and that’s a good thing. Who knows

when the actual tipping point occurred? Was it mobile, BYOD, cloud development, shadow IT, SaaS adoption, the

emergence of millennials, or the convergence of all of the above that caused the sea change? All we know is that

we’re now in a different era, and it represents a unique opportunity for IT to become a true business enabler.

Modern enterprise end user infrastructure is comprised of multitudinous people, devices, applications, tools and

communications with millions of interactions and dependencies going on at any one time. This is the Unified

Workspace environment and, with limited visibility, IT is only partially in control. In many cases IT organizations

rely on their partners or end users to understand components they cannot observe directly, making them purely

reactive in planning and delivery.

In conjunction with this, users and their expectations have also changed. Empowered users with the ear of the

business want the same kind of productivity and choice at work that they enjoy with their personal devices and

applications. They are tech savvy and always want to understand the technology at the core of how they earn

their livelihood.

Given the dynamics of this world, how can personas help IT?

Why Use Personas? Personas are abstract models of end users based on the work patterns, behaviors and tools of real people within

an organization. As models, personas give us the ability to understand how end users do their work and how their

work can be made more productive. Information technologists use personas to better understand their

companies and help align the business with IT. Personas are used as tools to distill users down to a manageable

number of user types, and to communicate and discuss their goals and needs. Personas also allow for a more

holistic understanding of infrastructure, its components, and the business processes to which it is tied. Knowing

what a persona requires from a hardware, software, mobility, and security perspective allows end user computing

teams tasked with their support to properly provision hardware, software and services as well as direct support

resources, including budget and personnel, to maximize the end user experience.

From a budgeting perspective, being able to negotiate hardware contracts, software licensing contracts, and the

like based on real numbers of what is required (and, more to the point, what is NOT required), allows for optimal

budgeting and cost savings in these negotiations, since the enterprise will not need to buy more compute power

than is needed per desktop or laptop. IT and purchasing will know exactly how many licenses of what software

product are needed, instead of the current semi-educated guessing that is used by so many IT organizations.

Personas have been around awhile in various forms. They have been used for years by software developers to

better understand requirements and to develop use cases. They have also been used by consultants as a

framework in the initial assessment of an IT environment. Personas allowed the IT consultant, for example, to

segment a complex IT environment so they could better understand underlying issues and develop strategies for


remedying those issues. However, there were problems with how these personas were constructed. Consultants

often used interviews and day-in-the-life studies to gather information, invariably leaving holes in the information

gathered. Unfortunately, one common result of the challenging collection and structuring process was the

inclusion of fictitious information. This approach would, more times than not, ultimately yield either an

incomplete picture or a completely wrong picture of the environment due, in large part, to human error. When

these manual efforts are used, human error will eventually always set the effort on a path of diminished benefits

and possible failure.

Even worse, after a company or a consulting group went through the process of defining personas and doing the

initial groupings, it was effectively impossible to manually keep the personas up-to-date; people changed jobs,

new people were hired and others left the company. In addition, the attributes that made up a given persona

could change as new devices and applications were added and PCs and laptops were replaced or refreshed.

This all culminates in a simple question: is there a process that will allow IT organizations to maintain visibility into

their end user needs and manage them efficiently and accurately with Personas?

We believe that we can use Lakeside Software’s SysTrack to overcome the biggest weakness in the use of

Personas and that we can use SysTrack to define them with real world, continuously updated data. From there we

can ensure that, based on these defining characteristics, users will remain in the proper Persona group, as defined

by their needs and usage.

In the event that these characteristics change, dynamic updates can then move a user to another Persona group.

Beyond that, alerts, notifications, and actual actions can be taken to ensure that this user is receiving all the

proper device, software and mobility deemed necessary for that Persona. More importantly, we can also ensure

that provisioning of items from the previous Persona are removed as well.

Lakeside Software’s SysTrack SysTrack is an end user analytics platform that gathers thousands of data points per second on end user and

supporting systems. This data covers every detail about the end user experience, hardware, performance,

applications used, operating system, boot and login times, power consumption, mobility, user security,

virtualization infrastructure, storage and more. Leveraging a patented distributed database architecture, stored

locally on the desktop, laptop, VDI session or SBC host, data is then summarized and uploaded on a daily basis to

a master DataMine. Lakeside has built visualization and reporting tools that allow the data to be analyzed and

trended so that patterns and anomalies in the environment can be seen. One of the tools, SysTrack Visualizer for

example, facilitates user segmentation. It is capable of visualizing specific personas and then continuously

populating the data that make up those personas with real time information.


Lakeside Software’s Approach to Persona Assessment

Figure 1 – Approaches to Persona Assessment

Our SysTrack End User Analytics platform can:

• Segment and plan user provisioning so users can be more easily supported with hardware, software and

services in a unified workplace environment

• Help facilitate the on-boarding and off-boarding process, as well as track persona changes when an

individual moves from one job to another or from one location to another within an organization

• Enable EUC teams to dynamically move a user to a different persona based on their real world work,

notify the correct support team, update the correctly maintained persona listing, and potentially (in the

VDI space) move that user to a new VDI pool, reducing their hardware reservations and freeing up

resources for other users. (In a large VDI environment, this could save thousands of dollars and many

service calls.)

• Provide a targeted refresh process rather than the expensive, one size fits all refresh process that most

companies use today

• Provide segmentation for ‘as-a-Service’ subscriptions, for example, in the Microsoft world determine

which users would be fine with Office 365 E3 and which users need Office 365 E5

• In the VDI world, determine which users need a VDI desktop and which users would be fine with a

published desktop or individual applications

All of the above points help organizations optimize their resources and save money. The potential savings directly

correlates to how much automation can replace manual steps in the processes involved in creating, managing and

maintaining Personas in a given environment.


Figure 2 – Persona Distribution

Defining Workspaces and Personas In May 2015 Gartner analysts Federica Troni, Ken Dulaney, and Richard Marshall published an excellent paper

entitled, “Segment Users by Workspace to Allocate Physical Devices, Digital Tools, Support and Services.” In that

paper the authors came up with four essential workspaces:

• Deskbound

• Non-Deskbound

• Shared

• Industrial

They defined each of the workspaces in detail including what devices are used in each workspace and what roles

might be included in each workspace. They then provided a methodology for how each workspace might be

populated with the right set of computing and communication devices. In our experience, this is a very valuable

approach; using Lakeside’s SysTrack, we can determine whether a persona is Deskbound, Non-Deskbound, or

Shared. “Industrial”, however, is trickier because a client’s hardened devices might not be included in a public list

of known hardened devices. In that case we’d need the client to provide a list of what they consider to be their

Industrial devices and SysTrack can take the discovery from there.


Once we determine whether a persona is Deskbound, Non-Deskbound, Shared or Industrial, we then propose to

take that Persona to the next level by determining whether the Persona is a Knowledge Worker, a Task Worker, or

a Power User. Using the vast wealth of data that the SysTrack agent collects, Lakeside has developed an

automated discovery process that analyzes usage patterns to determine Knowledge Workers, Task Workers, and

Power Users.

In the example below, we determined that a user could be Deskbound using any device and that he would be

considered Deskbound if he was on the same subnet for 70% of the time. We would not consider a user

Deskbound if they used a VM or published desktop or if they were mobile. For the Non-Deskbound, a user could

be using any endpoint and would be considered mobile if they were on a different subnet 70% or more of the

time. A Shared user could share any device and be either fixed on one subnet or move across multiple subnets. If

they were using a VM or a Published Desktop, we considered them a Shared user. As mentioned above,

customers would have to make a determination about which devices they considered Industrial, and once we

have that list, we can segment the associated users.

Once we segment users into Deskbound, Non-Deskbound, Shared and Industrial, we can further segment into

Knowledge Worker, Task Worker, and Power User. Our experience has been that for Task Workers you need to

normalize the data per customer. Again in the example below the customer determined that a Task Worker used

10 or fewer applications which is probably at the high end of the number of applications for a Task Worker. We

developed a score for determining a power user based on the user’s consumption of CPU, Memory and IO. The

Power User data is pulled from our SysTrack Persona Visualizer "User Details" dataset. Knowledge Workers would

be all those users in neither the Task Worker nor the Power User groupings.

Figure 3 – User Segmentation Guidelines


The example below is from an actual Financial Services customer. We were able to go into a unit within that

company and break out the number of Deskbound, Non-Deskbound, and Shared Users. The customer did not

have any Industrial Users. We further segmented each of those groups into Knowledge Workers, Task Workers

and Power Users.

Figure 4 – User Persona Segmentation Study

At this point we are going to be able to satisfy the Persona needs of many customers, systems integrators and

consulting firms. As we have seen, at the high level, and using the Gartner personas, we can determine

Deskbound, Non-Deskbound, Shared and Industrial and, if needed, we can go a level deeper and determine

whether for each of those segments the Persona is a Knowledge Worker, a Task Worker, a Mobile Worker or a

Power User.

However, we find that in many cases clients want to define personas even more deeply and they want to take it

down to yet another level. Let’s call this level Role-based Personas. They’re still abstract models, but another step

closer to the work of actual users. For example, a large healthcare provider might decide that one of their

personas is “doctor” and doctors might include General Practitioners, Nurse Practitioners, Internists, Surgeons,

Dermatologists, Oncologists and all of the other specialties. Again, we find that this level of persona resonates

with our clients. We think that over time Systems Integrators and consulting organizations will not only utilize

personas at the more abstract level like those suggested by Gartner, but also engage with clients to help in the

development and delivery of personas that are closer to the actual roles in a given industry. As such, they will

begin building libraries of personas for each of the industries they serve. Thus, when they first engage with a


client they will already have a set of role-based personas that they will offer as a starting point, and clients will

then work with their integrator or consultant to further refine and customize per their particular business.

Figure 5 – Persona: Doctors and Nurse Practitioners

Persona Banking Use Case In the rest of this paper, we’re going to look at how Role-based Personas might be developed and used at a bank

and how SysTrack could help populate those personas, as well as continuously refresh them.

Project Requirements In this very large “Big” bank, a project team was charged to develop a set of personas that would work for the

entire bank. Representatives from across the bank were chosen to participate on the project team. The project

team consisted of a project manager and two stakeholders from each of the verticals, as well as representatives

from global engineering and global operations. This project team worked for just under a year developing their

personas.

From the outset, the project team decided that they needed a succinct problem statement that would identify

the issues that needed to be addressed, to set the direction for the project team and to help guide the planning

process. Their problem statement addressed why they saw the need for personas. The problem statement stated

that the sheer size of the bank added a level of complexity that made it difficult to properly support the various

user types within the organization and the advent of unified computing further exacerbated the problem. By


knowing what each persona required from a hardware, software, security, mobility and support perspective, it

would allow the bank to properly direct resources including budget and personnel so that their personas could be

effectively and efficiently provisioned and supported.

The project team conducted numerous meetings across the various business verticals and at varying levels within

each organization. At each meeting, the team explained the goals of the project which were to:

• Consolidate the initial proposed list of user segments down to a workable number of personas.

(Eventually the bank ended up with 10 personas.)

• Ensure the personas included every single employee at the bank and every consultant and contractor

as well

• Gain buy-in from the various groups on all aspects of the work from what personas were chosen, to

the details around each persona including everything from a description of each persona down to

CPU, memory, disk size, application stack (beyond core apps installed in build), mobility requirement,

encryption requirement and regional requirements for each persona

The intent was to include the input from all of the verticals in order to make final agreement easier because every

vertical and all key groups had ownership and input throughout the process.

The project team determined a persona based on user CPU, memory, and disk usage, what applications were

used beyond core applications in the image, how mobile the user was, as well as their encryption

requirements. As the team worked, they identified gaps and problems that needed to be resolved.

The final persona plan recommended nine personas, and the plan was sent up to EUC senior management for

approval and implementation. Implementing the persona plan included hardware renegotiation with desktop,

laptop vendors, application package suite restructuring and virtual image changes to reflect different personas -

to– VDI Image requirements for CPU/mem/disk and application usage.

Nothing they planned included anything remotely like an automated process. Everything was done manually. This

meant that while on day one everything looked and functioned fine, without proper maintenance, the

management of users to persona quickly became disjointed. There was no automated process to keep the

personnel-to-persona map correct. For example, if a user currently in a remote sales site (persona: Mobile

Worker) changed jobs and moved to an administrative assistant inside the sales office she reported through

(persona: Office Worker), she still continued to use the mobile application stack on the mobile hardware

platform. Accordingly, she didn’t have the proper applications or hardware needed for an Office Worker. The

bank saw 9,000 changes like this per month or 108,000 in a year. Without the ability to keep up with these

changes, the bank was wasting millions in over provisioned hardware, and excessive application licenses.

Another problem was that the bank decided to keep the number of images per region to just one for both

traditional and virtual desktops. This mandate required every user to have the same core application stack that


came with the build or in the image. This wasted licenses for products that users simply didn’t use (Adobe Writer,

Full license, WinZip, Office Pro instead of base, etc.). Using the personas to identify optimal asset utilization would

have made the program a huge success.

Finally, there were no steps taken to ensure data remained valid and not stale. Some testing was done to validate

users were getting the right Virtual Machine based on their need and persona, but again no automated process

was put in place to move users as their jobs changed. The result of all of the time and effort put into this manual

process was a snapshot in time listing every employee at the time of the snapshot and their associative persona

identification. No real cost savings were identified because decision makers were not comfortable enough with

the stale data to:

• Make decisions on application license reductions

• Make hardware platform model count reductions

The SysTrack Solution At Lakeside Software, we undertook a project to automate the persona discovery, incorporation and

management processes. To do this, we deployed our SysTrack software onto many disparate systems inside our

company. End-user behavior was monitored by the Lakeside SysTrack Agent and compiled on the SysTrack Master

Server. After thirty days of data collection, patterns of usage were analyzed and compiled. The goal of the project

was to determine how those involved in the study worked by answering the following questions:

• Who is a member of the target group?

• What devices, applications and services do they currently use?

• When do they work? What does their typical day look like?

• Where do they work? How mobile are they?

• Why is their productivity being impacted?

• How can their experience be improved?

We then developed an automated report that addresses and populates each of those questions. In the report, we

look at all of the key attributes of the persona including devices used, resource consumption per CPU, memory,

and storage, printer use, what domain they use, USB usage, GPU usage, and mobile device usage. We also looked

at their business-critical applications and what public and private websites they visited. We mapped the day in the

life of each user including when they were working remotely. We were able to determine who all of the users

were, what their system usage was, which users used multiple systems, how much they used each system, and

what domains they used. We took a look at their resource consumption by CPU, by memory and by IOPS, as well

as their storage usage and what storage devices they were using. We mapped their drive usage and their printer

usage.

SysTrack’s dashboarding capability allows us to display the results of our persona segmentation in a variety of

graphs. Below is an example of the number of critical applications utilized by each persona type:


In the world of Unified Computing, IT absolutely needs to understand what users are mobile and how much they

are mobile. Using SysTrack we were able to determine end user mobility by looking at two behaviors:

• Observed Mobility – the use of a mobile capable end-user device as evidenced by changes in the devices

subnet IP address

• Exchange Synchronization – events associated with end-user device email synchronization to Microsoft

Exchange

For Observed Mobility we determined the following classes:

• Roamer/Mobile: Users who are observed using portable systems and regularly change subnets (greater

than 12 changes in 30 days)

• Zoner Plus/Potentially Mobile: Users who are observed using portable systems and seldom change

subnets (at least 1 change but less than 12 changes in the past 30 days)

• Zoner/Internally Mobile: Users who are observed using portable systems or multiple stationary systems

within a single subnet

• Homer/Stationary: Users who are observed using a single physical stationary system

• VDI User: Users who are observed using a virtual machine


• Terminal Service User: Users who are observed using a terminal service system

• Virtual Server User: Users who are observed using a virtual server

• Physical Server User: Users who are observed using a physical server

With Exchange Synchronization, we can determine the number of mobile devices attributed to the user by

determining how many of that user’s mobile devices are synchronizing with the exchange server. We can also

determine the mobile device type – iPhone, iPad, Android, down to Samsung SMN920A.

Application Usage is also key in determining which users belong to which persona. SysTrack not only tracks which

applications are used, but we also track applications by Focus Time. We not only know what applications are open

at any one time, but also which applications are getting the most actual usage. This allows us to determine which

applications are the highest priority for a user, and a persona and the applications that are the critical business

applications for the enterprise. In fact, after determining the critical applications, we can determine their typical

weekly use. For a given persona and even for a given user, there may be a critical application that falls outside the

business’s critical applications. This is important to understand as well.

Other areas that we track include VPN usage, the number of concurrent users, and website usage including public

and private website usage.

The net of the multiple dimensions of data gathering and consolidation made possible with SysTrack is a fully

formed, continuously updated picture of existing personas and the users associated with them.

Persona Benefit Summary

By deploying personas populated and continuously refreshed with SysTrack data, we see numerous benefits:

• For those designing and architecting solutions, a ready set of use cases should speed the design process,

reduce design risk and lower cost

• For Procurement, a targeted refresh will allow the ability to provide an end user with new hardware only

when it’s needed and, when they do get new hardware, it will be optimized to their needs

• For Service Desk and service providers, services are tailored and targeted per persona – one-size-for-all

no longer makes sense


• For Asset Managers, provide the ability to optimize both the hardware and application environments and

eliminate unused software licenses and unused purchased computing resources

• For Go Green Companies, provide the ability to intelligently manage power based on actual day-in-the-life

data

• For Transformation Program Managers, provide the ability to better plan and manage large

transformation and migration projects by knowing what groups are where and what each group needs to

do or have based on the transformation or migration plans

• For Security Managers, personas can make vivid the security needs of distinct user groups. Personas can

speed the development of targeted security solution and policies as well. Personas can be used to

determine to what applications and locations a persona should have access. Then, using SysTrack, be able

determine whether there are exceptions being seen to given security policies for a persona – (such as

executables, accessing systems or locations etc.)

• For Disaster Recovery and Crisis Planners traditional disaster recovery focused on restoring the data

center or how to recover in a backup center. Little focus was put on the end user, but in this new world

where the end user is at the center of every company and where significant data will reside either in the

cloud or with them, existing disaster recovery needs to be scrapped and replaced with plans that are

much more user centric. Personas can not only identify the hardware, application, storage and network

needs of the various personas, but also identify any safety concerns there may be because of location,

where they’re likely located and possible temporary work areas, what device(s) they may have with them,

who they need to collaborate with to get their work done and much more.

• For Risk and Compliance Managers – Personas can help assess the level of compliance against company

regulations and policies as well as outside regulatory requirements.

Going forward, Lakeside is looking to work with their SI partners to help them build out persona libraries for their

customers. It may be that a given SI wants a more abstract level of persona – for example, Knowledge Worker,

Task Worker, Power User, Mobile Worker. We can help them do that. There are others who will want to build a

library of personas by industry and we’ve provided some banking examples in this document demonstrating what

those might look like. The key for us will be automating the cultivation and usage of these personas to the fullest

extent possible. For example, we want to create custom triggers based on hardware utilization realities.

Accordingly, we would like to dynamically move a user to a different persona based on their real-world hardware

utilization, notify the correct support team, update the correctly maintained persona listing, and potentially (in

the VDI space) move that user to a new VDI pool, reducing their hardware reservations and freeing up resources

for other users. In a large VDI plant this could save thousands of dollars and many calls for “system slowness” to

the Help Desk.


Our contention is that the value that can be derived by businesses using personas is enormous. We see SysTrack-

based personas as a catalyst for innovation across numerous disciplines within an enterprise. This journey has just

begun and we couldn’t be more excited about its potential.

For More Information For more information about SysTrack and Lakeside Software please visit us on the web

http://www.lakesidesoftware.com.

Lakeside Software, Inc. – Global Headquarters 40950 Woodward Avenue, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304 USA +1 248 686 1700 Lakeside Software Solutions Limited – EMEA Headquarters Morgan House, Madeira Walk, Windsor, Windsor and Maidenhead, SL4 1EP, UK +44 (0) 1753 272360 Lakeside Software Pty Limited – Australia/New Zealand Headquarters Level 17, 40 Mount Street, Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia +61 (2) 8417 2100 ©Lakeside Software, Inc. 1997-2018. Lakeside Software and SysTrack are registered trademarks and/or

trademarks of Lakeside Software, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their

respective owners.

http://www.lakesidesoftware.com/

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