Since their work often occurs in the background of an organization’s core business, IT professionals sometimes do their daily tasks without encountering customers, or even thinking much about them. Even IT executives are sometimes so focused on the internal needs of the enterprise that customers are not top of mind.

Yet everyone would agree that customers are affected by the work of the IT team, and the best organizations are deliberate in aligning IT priorities with the needs of customers. To understand these needs, it’s helpful to have a connection—direct or indirect—with the clients the company is trying to reach.

Diverse connections with customers

Francis Fung’s IT career has involved different orientations toward the customer. After completing his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United Kingdom—including an MBA with a certificate in Marketing from the University of Wales—Fung returned home to work for Hong Kong Telecom, which at the time was a regulated monopoly.

“The market penetration was 100 percent, so we didn’t need to worry about market share at all,” Fung recalls. “We did need to convince customers to subscribe to new offerings such as call waiting and call forwarding, and improving customer service was an essential part of that effort.”

Once telecommunications was deregulated in Hong Kong, Fung joined the startup operations of Hutchison Telecom. “Suddenly, I was the newcomer trying to introduce competition, acquire customers, and build market share,” he remembers. “This was definitely a new challenge for me, as IT needed to be tightly integrated with marketing.”

Fung then moved to a two-year contract with the government of Hong Kong, where he was tasked with centralizing the systems through which citizens communicated with government. “Because it’s Hong Kong, there were a huge number of different departments,” he explains, “and each department had its own phone number—more than 500 in total. So our objective was to integrate all of those services onto a single number.”

Fung was a perfect fit to lead this project, as he had completed a similar project at Hong Kong Telecom. “We integrated the information from all of the departments into an Oracle CRM system,” he says. “We built a voice-activated menu system and set up a call center with a staff of 100.” The result is a much more convenient and efficient system for citizens to access government services.

Moving into real estate

After a stint as a principal CRM consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Fung was offered the position as CTO of Midland Realty, one of Asia’s largest real estate agencies. “Real estate was a new culture for me,” he asserts. “The emphasis is more sales-oriented, and since we have locations throughout China, the network is more distributed.”

The role itself was somewhat different as well. “My previous roles were more multi-task—part technology and part management,” Fung explains. “At Midland Realty, I focus on IT operations and IT development. It’s more hands-on here, developing and implementing specific strategies.” His 80- person team includes a development team that is able to perform much of the strategic and tactical work in-house.

Despite a tighter emphasis on IT, Fung’s role is not isolated from customers; his team manages Midland’s Website, which serves as an e-commerce portal. “Between the users of our Website and our internal customers—the sales force—I am constantly aware of how my team can affect our firm’s business,” Fung says.

Midland’s IT infrastructure is rather unique in that most of its employees work at one of 6,000 thin client workstations, designed primarily to access the firm’s proprietary real estate management application and a Linux-based email system. Around 550 executives and mobile employees, on the other hand, use thick clients— mostly Lenovo laptops—with email delivered through Microsoft Exchange.

Demonstrating software license compliance

Every business in Hong Kong must demonstrate to government regulators each year that all software installed on any endpoint is properly licensed. This was previously a huge task for Midland Realty.

“An engineer had to physically visit every office to determine exactly which software they were using,” Fung recalls. “The survey itself took two employees three months, full time. We would then put that information into a database and compare it with the number of licenses we had for each piece of software. This took another employee two weeks. We would buy extra licenses if needed, and finally we would run the report for the government. It was very time consuming.”

It quickly became clear that this practice was unsustainable, so Fung’s team began a search for a solution that would automate inventory management. Symantec Partner Automated Systems Limited, the Hong Kong subsidiary of CSC, developed a cost-benefit comparison between several solutions. Altiris Client Management Suite from Symantec was the clear winner in this analysis, beating Microsoft Systems Management Server and WinAudit, a freeware solution.

Fung’s team moved quickly to implement Client Management Suite, and the results have been remarkable. “The same reports that previously required nearly four months of time and more than 1,000 IT staff hours now consume less than 15 minutes of one person’s time, thanks to Altiris Client Management Suite,” Fung asserts. “If we want to do so, we can run a weekly report to make sure that nobody has installed any applications illegally.”

Delivering patches and updates

Altiris Client Management Suite has also helped Fung’s team to streamline patch management and delivery of software updates. “We used to get 10 to 20 help desk calls every time we sent out a new patch,” Fung remembers. “Software updates also generated a lot of calls, as users had to download and install them individually.” The result was more than 100 extra help desk tickets per month.

Today, Altiris Client Management Suite delivers patches and updates without user or helpdesk intervention, and without interrupting employees’ work. Fung conservatively estimates that this reclaims more than 12,000 hours annually in staff productivity.

Strengthening security

For almost a decade, Symantec AntiVirus protected Midland Realty’s PCs and laptops, while Symantec Mail Security for SMTP protected the Linux-based email system on its thin clients. Recently, Fung’s team bolstered this protection by deploying Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Edition for endpoint and messaging security for their entire network.

The Symantec Protection Suite bundle includes licensing for Symantec Brightmail Gateway, which now sits in front of both email servers, scanning incoming and outgoing email for spam and malware. For Midland Realty’s Microsoft Windows-based thick clients, Symantec Endpoint Protection provides comprehensive security, while Symantec Mail Security for Microsoft Exchange provides an additional layer of protection for email.

“Symantec Protection Suite is blocking about 4.62 million spam messages each month, with only 71,000 messages being legitimate,” Fung notes. “This solution has eliminated user complaints about spam and has saved a lot of IT staff time in cleaning up infected machines.”

Business value to benefit customers

Today, one member of Fung’s network team manages security, and it’s only part of his job. “The fact that one person, part time, can administer security for 6,300 employees in 400 office locations says a lot about the efficiencies we’ve achieved through Symantec’s products,” Fung asserts.

“If I had to sum up the benefits that we have seen with Symantec solutions,” Fung concludes, “it would boil down to enhanced security and significant staff time savings. The fact that security and endpoint management are largely automated enables us to focus on more strategic initiatives.”

For Fung and his team, this means more opportunities to connect with the public, enhance the customer experience, and ultimately drive revenue for Midland Realty.

Mark L.S. Mullins is a managing editor of CIO Digest and senior manager of Symantec’s Global Reference Program team.