Build a better digital workplace by focusing on visibility

How can DEM bridge the gap between what IT can see and what end users experience?

Organizations can’t always say for sure if they have a handle on what’s happening across their digital environments or the issues their employees face.

And eventually technology leadership, from CIOs down to IT admins, all find themselves wondering the same thing: What would our end users say about their digital employee experience?

Or rather, what aren’t they saying?

More often than not, IT teams don’t have the visibility they need and end users aren’t always upfront about issues they encounter. That disparity between what IT can see and what end-users are experiencing can quickly lead to bigger problems down the line — especially when it comes to support, transformation projects, employee productivity, and even business outcomes (recruiting, retention, innovation, return on investments (ROI), growth, etc.).

Knowing is half the battle won

Say a remote worker is having problems with a crashing app.

Seems harmless at first — just reopen the app, or maybe restart and try again.

The second or third time it happens is a little more annoying. The fourth and fifth instances are completely frustrating. And maybe after the sixth crash, when a lot of that day’s work has just up and disappeared, that remote worker begins to weigh their options:

• Should I bother IT with this?
• How much do I really need to use that app at all?
• Maybe I can download something to fix it? Or find something new to use?

It’s because of cases like this that IT teams need the ability to look across complex digital environments in real time and through historical trends to see what problems are occurring and why. Because by the time this user alerts IT — if they decided to at all — their digital employee experience has already suffered; productivity has been lost dealing with crashes and downtime; and that issue could have snowballed into a much bigger problem that impacts others and requires more time, staff, and resources to solve.

But of course there’s much more going on across the digital environment than just an app crash.

How does digital experience management improve visibility?

Digital environments never stay the same for long. As technologies evolve, priorities shift, and Flex-work expands, the IT estate will always change, grow, and become vastly more complex along with it.

Which makes keeping tabs on everything vastly more difficult, too. And although there are countless tools and solutions out there to help IT departments track bits and pieces of their IT estate, most fall short of providing the breadth and depth of detail needed to see clear across the digital landscape and into end-user experiences.

That’s why the key to a more holistic view of any computing environment starts by looking in the right place with the right kind of solution.

Digital experience management — a process of analyzing usage and performance data across devices, structures, and services to understand the quality of users’ digital experiences — is designed to focus on the most critical part of any digital infrastructure: The endpoint.

By deploying a lightweight agent to both physical and virtual devices, a DEM platform can continuously gather metrics — including device details and user behaviors — to uncover greater insights about digital environments.

For Lakeside Software’s Digital Experience Cloud — a cloud-based platform powered by its DEM solution, SysTrack — this process involves securely capturing more than 10,000 metrics every 15 seconds from the device, providing IT with both real-time data and historical context to understand:

• Hardware and app performance
• Network Connectivity & Latency
• App or system faults
• Slow startups
• Compliance Posture to ensure highest level of device/OS security

Any one of these data points alone helps fill in blind spots across the IT estate. But all that combined data, coupled with end-user feedback and sentiment information, gives IT a more complete view of what users are experiencing and all the factors that impact those digital experiences.

All that data, which Lakeside collects across 175 classes of objects, also reveals one of the most important metrics in IT: The end-user experience score.

EUX score
An EUX score lets IT know at a glance the overall state of an organization’s digital environment and the impact is has on productivity. It can also greatly influence day-to-day operations and even prompt proactive IT support, as well as become a powerful key performance indicator (KPI) in IT initiatives, transformation projects, and business strategies.

And when you ask yourself again “What would end-users say about their digital employee experience?”, the answer shouldn’t be such a mystery. It should be right there for IT to see.

For more information, please write to salesinfo@lakesidesoftware.com

Write to the author at anuj.khandelwal@lakesidesoftware.com