Editorial
The digital employee experience (DEX) market has grown over the past few years, with an expansion in the range and capabilities of tools available, and businesses are starting to reap the benefits. There’s no shortage of proof that DEX augments and improves enterprise IT across the board, with companies using the platform to systematically eliminate problems in their IT environments, reduce costs and increase employee engagement.
While there's been incredible adoption from a DEXops discipline, there is still room to expand the scope of coverage and bring insights to new environments. And as some have rolled out DEX solutions for specific purposes, e.g. better management of device lifecycles, there is opportunity to engrain it more concretely into operations.
Generally the end user computing (EUC) world is the first one covered because it’s such a target-rich environment, alongside specific projects like Windows 11 or other transformation projects where the cost and complexity can quickly add up without visibility. But DEX has so much more to offer. By moving past the initial scope and into a truly holistic DEXops approach, organizations can unlock far greater strategic value from their technology investments.
A Systemic Approach to DEX
Having a holistic approach to DEX matters for several reasons. First, once you’ve introduced monitoring across applications, devices and all other areas of the EUC environment, it becomes far easier to identify root causes. And second, all that broad data, analysis and insight can augment other areas in ways you never considered before.
Take the issues surrounding Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as an example. The promise of VDI was that it would allow businesses to operate more efficiently with centralized management, preferred architectural designs, improved security and provide a more stable and performant experience. In practice this hasn’t been the case. A good VDI experience relies on so many elements working in harmony, and that complexity can take far too long to understand and troubleshoot when problems arise, driving up remediation times and support costs, along with business frustrations.
For example, our research has found that 31% of businesses have to escalate VDI issues to L3 engineering or to a specialized VDI team, two very expensive resources. Yet the most common issue reported is application functionality failure (54%) which has nothing whatsoever to do with the VDI itself! Over time, the VDI team gets a tarnished reputation even though most problems aren’t due to the platform.
DEX as a Strategy
Let’s use a healthcare analogy. Imagine a frontline healthcare worker at a remote hospital who raised a ticket with IT because her virtual machine is so slow it’s almost unusable, resulting in less time spent with patients every day.
Her company has a DEX capability deployed across the full enterprise, which provides insight into the performance of both physical and virtual machines. They can quickly see that her problem not only isn’t coming from the VDI itself but is also happening in the same application on physical devices. Great! Immediately they can rule out needing to escalate to L3.
But they haven't found the root cause yet. Is it the version or patch level of the application she’s using? Is it just a problem for some within a department, or do all application users have the problem? Does she have a particular configuration of her application that needs to be changed?
All these questions need to be answered — and quickly — so that she and everyone else can get back to doing their job and patients can get the care they need. Yet without a holistic approach to DEX that encompasses all areas of the IT environment, these teams will end up wasting huge amounts of time trying to determine root cause, possibly even needing a larger SWAT team to troubleshoot.
More than that, having a comprehensive suite of DEX capabilities means that, regardless of what issues arise and where they come from, IT can identify and preemptively address them before users become frustrated.
The DEX Doctor Makes House Calls
In many ways, a DEX discipline (DEXops) is like the medical profession. Patients will always be coming in requiring quick diagnoses and cures. And the more diagnostic and analytic tools you can give the doctors, the more insight they can gain and the better they can care for their community. If the only capability within the hospital was the x-ray machine, as important as it is, it would leave many more lacking the type of care they need.
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Then take the idea to its logical conclusion, which is that patients shouldn’t need to come in at all. With the right DEXops discipline with proactive and preventative care, the patient never becomes sick, or at the very least the right care can instead come to the patient.
While DEX coverage across traditional EUC or within the scope of specific projects is vital, businesses should consider a broader coverage. This provides IT teams with the support they need to properly provide resiliency and first-class employee experiences for the full range of the business.
Editor's Note: Read more on the world of digital employee experience management below:
- EX Problems? Enter the Digital Employee Experience Management Platform — Gartner recommends that organizations looking to improve EX strategies should explore digital employee experience (DEX) management platforms. Here's why.
- 5 Things You Can Do Today – for Free – to Improve Your Digital Employee Experience — As digital employee experience leaders, our focus should be on making big changes. But we shouldn't lose sight of the simple actions that can improve DEX.
- HP's Faisal Masud Doubles Down on Employee Experience — What is a long-time ecommerce executive doing in a hardware giant? I sat down with him to find out.
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