IT’s role in the modern workplace has never been more critical and complex than right now. IT is pressured to roll out new technologies and drive innovation all while providing instant support for end users in an ever-changing workplace. Employees expect to work with the best tools in tech, from wherever they are, and however they choose. Based on a 2020 report by Vanson Bourne, companies understand this expectation— 82% recognize the importance of Digital Employee Experience for business performance. Yet, the same report states that IT issues are commonplace and that 45% of employees never report the technology problems with which they are faced. With spending reaching more than $3.9 trillion annually (according to Gartner), why are organizations still struggling to improve the status quo?

The Industry Response

There are many IT operational technologies available that help to manage how IT services are delivered, such as application performance monitoring (APM), network monitoring, client management, IT service management (ITSM), mail survey software and many more. These system-centric technologies are not enough for the new modern era where employees’ digital experiences drive their productivity and engagement.

Without having sufficient visibility into employee experience data in real-time, IT struggles to optimize these services. None of these solutions help to understand how IT services are actually consumed by employees. They cannot answer simple questions like:

• Do you know what happened to your employees today?
• How productive were they?
• How engaged were they?
• What was their experience?

These blind spots are what we call the Digital Employee Experience Gap.

Welcome to the Modern Era of Digital Employee Experience

No business runs well without engaged employees. At the same time, employees cannot work well without a great digital workplace. The new workplace for the modern era is evolving very differently from the one that existed just a few years ago.

• IT services need to be more focused on users and less on devices and applications. Employees work increasingly in hybrid operating modes, switching on and off between working in office locations or remotely and seamlessly between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and traditional applications. Virtualization and thin clients are also steadily on the rise.
• Managing the digital employee experience means dealing less and less with core technical issues and more with driving employee adoption, engagement and collaboration.
• And finally, visibility of the experience is a good start but IT teams and organizations will require more intelligence, actionability, and insights to address issues before they even occur. IT teams will need to switch their modus operandi from reactive to proactive and aim to become preventive and predictive.

Boiling this down to a simple equation: In order to impact employees, we need to understand employees. We believe that the only way to truly deliver the future digital workplace is to consistently measure and manage the employee’s digital experiences, all the time, anytime.

Introducing Nexthink Experience

Today, we are unveiling the next generation of our platform, Nexthink Experience. Central to the new platform is Experience Optimization, a set of new capabilities that provide clear, prioritized guidance on how to improve and optimize experience across an organization. IT professionals can see what issues to address first, understand the likely causes and remediate problems quickly and effectively. This is all brought together in a single Optimization Hub allowing IT teams to monitor, measure and manage employees’ digital experience, focusing on how IT is consumed by employees and not just how it is delivered by the IT department:

• Digital Experience Score quantifies employee experience by collecting hundreds of technical metrics and correlating them with employee sentiment
• IssueRank™ delivers prioritized recommendations on what issues to address to deliver the greatest experience improvement
• CauseDetect™ uses artificial intelligence to analyze up to millions of data points to effortlessly pinpoint the likely root causes
• Playbooks provide step-by-step guidance to address the identified issues, incorporating data gathering and automated remediation via Nexthink Engage and Nexthink Act to resolve common problems

In today’s press release and in a series of executive insight blog posts, we are sharing more details on the launch of Nexthink Experience and how the platform is delivering on our vision. We will also be publishing additional content on our own journey as a company and how that is tied to the journey our customers are undertaking, including their approaches to how to successfully solve the challenges of this new era.

The next time you visit our web site, you’ll find additional details about Nexthink Experience and its various products and capabilities including Experience Optimization as well as a new platform solution brochure. In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more details of Nexthink Experience in webinars and overview videos as well.

We believe Nexthink Experience provides the intelligence, insight and actionability that IT must have to deliver great digital workplaces. And we are just getting started!

Bernd Leger, CMO, Nexthink

The post Managing the Digital Employee Experience: The Next Frontier for the Modern IT Organization appeared first on Nexthink.

Today we launched the next generation of our digital employee experience (DEX) management platform, Nexthink Experience™. We strongly believe that this technology will shape the future of end-user computing and I cannot help but think back nostalgically to how this entire journey started. As important as our platform has become for IT departments around the world, I wish I could say that the idea behind Nexthink came to me in some moment of divine intervention or deep introspection, like something you see in the movies.

The truth, however, is that the concept for this company was born, rather unintentionally, some 15 years ago during a research project I conducted for a master’s program in artificial intelligence at EPFL in Switzerland. One of the outside reviewers of my first prototype was the Chief Security Officer at a famous watch company. He said the work was so innovative that if I turned it into a product, he would buy it because his company needed true visibility into their endpoints. Taking his cue, my colleagues signed this first customer but more importantly, I formed a platform that, looking back, was way more powerful than I think we realized.

Unlocking the biggest contradiction in the IT world

It only took a few customers back then for us to see the bigger picture. By helping enterprise IT take down their most critical obstacles, we realized that Nexthink was highlighting a deeper issue in this industry, which is this: there is a blatant contradiction in the way IT interprets their services, and in the way employees experience those services.

Rarely does IT understand how or why employees engage with their networks, apps, and devices. People today expect their workplaces to deliver flawless digital experiences at any time, and from anywhere—but IT lacks the insight and tooling needed to proactively manage those experiences. Undoubtedly, CIOs are concerned with delivering digital projects on time and on budget, but those concerns need not come at the expense of a productive and engaged employee work experience. Digital workers should not be forced to manually reboot their devices 5x a day, or suffer through spotty video calls—IT should proactively handle those problems before they reach their employees.

We find that the average worker suffers around 100 technology disruptions per year, which for a company of 10,000 employees, can cost up to $25 million—and that’s just based on the incidents IT knows about. It is estimated that nearly half of all tech disruptions go unreported by employees. Unsurprisingly, too, most digital workers are employed by large enterprises which are notorious for exhibiting poor digital environments.

Of course, here at Nexthink we sympathize with IT’s situation, and that is why we have made a truly employee-centric solution to deliver tangible results.

“

“IT faces an extreme diversity of problems, and nowadays, everybody expects a personalized digital experience so that places a huge amount of pressure on IT departments who have limited resources and tooling to answer those problems”

Seeing is believing – digital experience management in action

If I tried to describe to you what an iPad or an Uber is, it would be way less effective than if you could see and experience those things firsthand. Similarly, our Digital Employee Experience management platform is best understood when it is put into action.

Before using Nexthink, our customers often spend weeks, sometimes months, trying to crack issues like poor network connectivity, device crashes, and complex software deployments—but whatever challenges they face, our platform can identify, often within minutes, the underlying causes and resolve those issues at scale. Using our built-in remote actions, on-screen messaging, and end user targeting features, IT can set automatic fixes across any employee device and hold themselves accountable with our real-time, comprehensive digital employee experience scoring system.

“

“Experience Optimization serves as both the brawn and the brains for IT. A technician’s skill set, or the fact that an IT department has limited resources—those things will no longer impede incidents from getting resolved.”

Each year our platform adds more game-changing capabilities and integrations, and this year is no different. Central to the new platform is Experience Optimization, a groundbreaking set of capabilities that provides clear, prioritized guidance on how to improve and optimize digital work across an organization. For the first time, IT professionals can see what issues they need to address first, understand the likely causes behind those problems, and quickly act with absolute certainty.

This feature, paired with our existing tech stack, helps remove the challenge that IT so often faces after diagnosing a problem. Instead of wondering “now what?”, our customers will have a summary of priorities to act upon and accompanying “playbooks” to show exactly how to resolve their issues.

The future of end-user computing

During these past few months, the rapid shift to flexible work has forced modern IT departments to manage their employees under virtual and hybrid environments that use both legacy and SaaS applications. The future of Digital Experience in the enterprise has to cover a wide range of new computing environments moving at light speed, all while gathering experience metrics from other places such as servers and networks. This is the ultimate purpose of our new platform—to become the Experience Hub across many sources of information for enterprise IT.

A good example of what this means is our remote worker pack. This module in our solution has been deployed in more than 200 organizations covering 2M employees in just a few months. We have never seen such adoption of a new product. The obstacles IT face with remote and flexible digital work cannot be overstated. As one CIO put it to me “I used to have 6 offices to manage, but now I’m looking after 30,000 individual offices!”.

Perhaps the idea behind Nexthink didn’t start with some Hollywood moment, but true stories are always better anyway, and this time, we’re writing the script.

Pedro Bados, Co-Founder & CEO, Nexthink

Register for a live webinar on July 14 to see Nexthink Experience and learn more.

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The post Forging Ahead, Nexthink’s Fight for Smarter IT & Better Digital Work Experiences appeared first on Nexthink.

We are proud to announce the next generation of our platform, Nexthink Experience™, a cloud-native solution that equips IT with the ability to proactively manage Digital Employee Experience (DEX) for continuous optimization. With a groundbreaking set of new capabilities, IT no longer has to struggle to answer the question “how do I solve this issue?” For the first time, they can prioritize issues, pinpoint causes, and resolve computing problems across their entire infrastructure.

By adding these capabilities to our existing foundation—which includes real-time analytics, digital experience scoring, automated remediation, and employee feedback—IT has the ability to resolve their most complicated network, application, and device problems easier than ever.

Let’s break down what makes Nexthink Experience so special:

A single hub for proactive problem solving & optimization

Key to our new platform is Experience Optimization, a central hub where IT professionals can measure, manage and improve their employees’ experience with devices, applications, and networks. Backed by Nexthink’s Digital Experience Score, the hub shows real-time device data and employee sentiment metrics, presented in several interactive charts. The Digital Experience Score helps IT interpret what’s happening across their environment from a macro-level and across specific devices, business applications, and productivity & collaboration tools. It also captures and correlates employee satisfaction to give a true perspective on employee experience. These overview dashboards also allows users to drill-down and explore event data at a granular level.

Experience Optimization gives IT the ability to monitor digital experience across the organization and immediately see what issues to focus on

Prioritized recommendations that help IT answer: “what issues should I focus on today?” & “how do I find the right fix?”

Every enterprise IT department is faced with limited time and resources, so being able to prioritize which issues are most critical can pay big dividends. IssueRank™ is a new capability in the platform that prioritizes the biggest tech issues that impact a company’s DEX. IT can see how many of their devices are affected by each issue, and how those issues impact their overall experience score.

IssueRank helps IT to prioritize their main performance problems, and predict how each issue is impacting their overall DEX score

Once IT selects a given issue to focus on, they immediately see a list of possible fixes and guidance on the best approach to take. This capability can replace painstaking manual investigations and eliminate the need for extensive trial-and-error analysis. IT can also decide the best course of action quickly, effectively and without requiring deep expertise in different technical domains.

Once issues are prioritized, it’s time to find the right fix. Nexthink Experience provides a list of possible fixes for IT to determine their best remediation approach.

Experience insights for flexible working environments

Nexthink Experience also gives IT the ability to monitor both in-office and remote working environments. In addition, our Remote Worker Experience library pack enables IT to resolve VPN & Wi-Fi performance issues, encrypt remote devices at scale, collect employee sentiment data, and address a host of other issues.

IT can understand in real-time how employees are experiencing their digital environment, no matter where they work.

Playbooks that offer simple, step-by-step remediation guidance for IT

Of course, prioritized recommendations and root cause analysis are big, but we also wanted to make sure IT had the ability to fully resolve their employees’ tech problems. Instead of spending hours trying to close out an incident, IT can now use over 50 playbooks to quickly tackle their most demanding tech challenges. Playbooks incorporate data collection, employee communication and automated remediations from Nexthink Engage and Nexthink Act—allowing IT to quickly automate fixes at scale and collect meaningful employee feedback.

Experience Optimization playbooks provide detailed guidance for IT on how to solve critical issues

Seamless integrations with existing business processes and IT infrastructure

Nexthink Experience can also integrate with popular ITSM tools like ServiceNow, Splunk and any chatbot adapter. The platform’s real-time employee data, powerful remote actions, and automated alerts add unique context to 3rd-party self-service portals and ticketing systems, helping IT to accelerate troubleshooting and corroborate their event data.

IT can integrate Nexthink intelligence into any chatbot adapter and interface, offering a unique way to assist employees using tools like Slack, MS Teams and others.

A SaaS platform built for enterprise IT & the Digital Employee Experience

As a cloud-native solution, Nexthink Experience allows IT to avoid the time, cost and risk of managing infrastructure and applications on-premises. Instead, they receive rapid time to value with Nexthink Experience, benefit from frequent updates, and can scale and adapt to any work environment (on-site, remote, or flexible).

What’s holding your IT department back?

Limited resources, competing demands, reactive problem solving—the list of issues that hold IT back is long, but we see organizations overcome those challenges every day. Right now, workers around the world depend on their digital experiences to fuel their day. We are proud to help IT see the world from their employees’ eyes, and fix problems in a way that is both practical and proactive.

The work for all of us at Nexthink doesn’t stop here. Over the coming weeks and months, our customers will continue to find new integrations and enhancements in Nexthink Experience, always with the goal that IT can do things bigger, better, and faster.

Now, let’s get to work.

Samuele Gantner, Chief Product Officer, Nexthink

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The post What’s Behind the New Nexthink Experience? appeared first on Nexthink.

Digital Experience firm analyzes employee sentiment on the IT service they’re receiving

IT experience management software company Nexthink is revving its efforts to help companies measure and improve how employees feel about their IT environments with a new release of its platform.

The Lausanne, Switzerland / Boston, US dual-headquartered company started that journey when founder and CEO Pedro Bados pondered the conundrum that although IT is central to our working lives, CIOs tend to know precious little about their customers. That led to Nexthink, a company that provides the tools to enhance what it calls the “digital employee experience”. Having swollen its ranks to 600 employees, the company is this month pushing out a significant upgrade that brings together all the necessary dashboards and prescriptive actions for IT leaders to take the pulse of the service they’re providing to users.

“People want to feel productive and IT plays a very important role,” says Samuele Gantner, Nexthink’s Chief Product Officer. “IT has been sold solutions to monitor what happens in the data center but they’re missing the point of view of the employee.”

For Gantner, the digital experience conversation has changed over time as more employees who are used to the superb experiences offered up in their consumer lives via Apple, Amazon, Spotify et al, question corporate IT and hold it to a higher standard. “When you look at the past the importance of getting a good digital experience, it has dramatically changed. Fifteen years ago, what people were getting from IT was what they were given.”

A new catalyst

Of course, a lot of us are growing accustomed to spending even more time with our devices as the pandemic forces us to work from home.

“Look at what’s happening in the current crisis,” Gantner urges. “I went from three hours a day in front of a screen to 10 hours a day in front of a screen.” But it’s also a broader shift in expectations at play here in the age of the consumerization of IT: this is “a generation of change with more expectations and more savvy”, he adds. Fail to delight the employee and the employee might well walk to a company with higher standards of provision and empathy.

That represents a scary proposition in the battle for talent and the three-cornered hat of people, processes and technology is key here: unless we understand all three, we are suffering from only partial vision as to what’s really going on among employees. Recent research commissioned by Nexthink and carried out by Vanson Bourne found that 45% of issues are never reported to the IT team by employees. So, for half of the problems, IT has no visibility that they even exist. “In the end, we’re talking human beings and people have frustrations,” Gantner argues persuasively. And how to discover and address those frustrations is at the hub of what Nexthink does.

Understanding the end user

Nexthink addresses user dissatisfaction both by asking human questions and looking at clues. Ultimately, it is offering a form of sentiment analysis and then optimizing experiences for happier outcomes. Using the “hub” of dashboards and consoles provided by Nexthink, IT departments can create scorecards to analyze levels of satisfaction, causes of annoyance and best-practice approaches and AI-fueled analytics to improving matters. Drilling down by country, department, persona and other factors helps to deliver a holistic view of what’s occurring.

Some causes of dissatisfaction are obvious: long, painful login processes and regular blue screens of death will try the patience of even the most forgiving staff members. But others can be harder to get to. The recent research found a major disconnect between IT and employees, with 84% of employees believing that their organisations should be doing more to improve the digital experience at work. However, a staggering 90% of IT leaders believe that workers are satisfied with technology in the workplace.

In my own experience, this is particularly true in areas where IT leaders are measuring the wrong things. Remember the famous case of Dell measuring service calls and concluding that all was well because service call times were short? This generated high scores for the company’s contact centre but the KPI was all wrong as customers were effectively having calls curtailed and were understandably furious. This is a classic case of businesses acting empirical, but being tone deaf to prosaic reality.

Nexthink does the opposite, zeroing in on being employee-centric and focusing on their all-round experience and then provides appropriate counsel. “We give them the recipe [to be better],” Gantner says.

So, for example, if a file-sharing tool is disappointing users, Nexthink can investigate by collating feedback, show that this is probably because the service has become slow to respond at certain times or in certain locations and it can recommend a fix, whether that’s an adjustment to network parameters, cleaning out a pile-up of old files, a replacement software package or cloud service, or something else entirely. Or if the issue is clear it can automatically remediate, often before an employee has even noticed the problem. You might think of Nexthink in high-concept terms as the destination where classic digital experience companies meet the makers of software for troubleshooting complex ICT processes.

From SLA to XLA

But if Covid-19 is shining yet more light on the user experience then, for Gantner, this is also about a broader change where companies are focusing on employee and customer experiences: we can’t all be Apple but we can at least be smarter in diagnosing issues and faster in going about fixing them. For CEOs, experience management has become a contender for the most important challenge they face and Gantner says that we are moving from a world of SLAs to “XLAs”, measuring experiences rather than service levels. This is also leading to new roles: Chief People Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, VP of Workplace Experience, Chief Digital Officer and so on. In business, delivering great experiences is key to success.

In this brave new world, IT leaders can’t be left behind and Nexthink offers a way for CIOs to be smarter and to impress C-suite peers with their knowledge of how to serve staff.

For Nexthink’s VP of Technical Services, Jon Cairns, this is a case of history coming full circle.

“If you think about the history of IT, it has always invested all this money in the back-end, and this is where the whole concept of SLAs comes from – everything is green so everything must be fantastic.”

IT “only inspects what it expects” and while it can identify a bug that’s slowing down a process, there’s precious little effort shown in getting to the bottom of what’s bugging users. “It’s a mindset change for IT to look at the front-end because it’s hard,” Cairns says.

By shining a light on one of the most neglected areas of company operations, Nexthink can deliver “Eureka moments” of revelation that change the way employees interact with IT systems. Cairns says that Nexthink is effectively pushing at an open door when he can show how companies can improve the IT they’re providing to users. “They understand immediately: we’re solving hard problems customers didn’t know could be solved. There are hard and soft costs if staff aren’t productive.”

With over 1,000 customers from Western Union to Hugo Boss, Lufthansa and Blackstone, the message is surely getting through: if IT is important then digital experience matters.

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The post Eureka! Nexthink Shines Light on What Users Really Think About IT appeared first on Nexthink.

Over the past few months, many organizations have transitioned their employees from mostly onsite to fully remote work environments. Now we’re entering into a phase where roughly 30% of the workforce will soon head back to the office, while the rest continue to work from home. This hybrid approach creates a complex situation for IT, instead of concentrating resources in one known location (home or the office), they have to deliver a superior and consistent digital experience regardless of where and how employees log into work. A new survey conducted this year found that 78% of IT leaders believe digital employee experience is essential or a high priority today, compared to only half (49%) 12 months ago.

We set out to find if the switch to remote work caused a severe upset in IT’s ability to manage their digital environments and what that might mean for future adjustments to the world of work. The survey findings and others from our previous research highlight the rapidly decreasing visibility that IT has over their employees’ digital experiences, especially due to so much work happening outside local office networks.

What’s hurting IT the most?

1. During the transition to remote work this year, employees struggled with three principal challenges: VPN access (38%); Wi-Fi connectivity / reliability (37%); and video conferencing apps (35%). This comes as no surprise that VPNs lead as a major pain point, IT rarely finds itself having to provision access to a VPN for every employee at the same time – in the past, capacity for VPN access may have been limited to 25-30% for some organizations.
2.  IT is still too reliant with on-premise software, which is making it even more difficult to support employees remotely. Over a third (35%) of IT leaders surveyed felt restricted in the support they could offer remote employees. Had they possessed SaaS software, that transition would have been much smoother and reduced the demands on VPN
3. IT was still playing catch-up, according to the survey, 37% said that employees didn’t have the right tools to be able to work when the transition to remote work was first made. Almost half (43%) of IT teams saw an increase in the number of support tickets from employees during the period of forced remote work.
4. Previous data from our Experience 2020 Report, shows that 45% of IT issues go unreported by employees. We can infer that employees face 2x as many issues, but IT has no way of knowing which users are affected.
5. Existing technologies are not enough – IT is working blind, trying to solve digital experience issues that their existing tools for application performance monitoring, network monitoring, client management, ITSM workflows, and email surveys simply cannot resolve. These are not enough for the new modern era where the traditional network perimeter has disappeared. These tools might suggest each separate track is working, but they cannot collectively show how employees experience these services in real-time.

What does the future hold for IT teams?

IT has a huge role to play in ensuring this new phase of hybrid working doesn’t result in a multi-tier organization with different experiences for employees. If employees are not able to stay engaged and productive at work, businesses will surely struggle to retain top talent and protect their bottom line. In the past, the onus was on the relatively small number of remote workers to manage. Now that the majority of employees will be away from the office for some time, if not indefinitely, companies need to take more responsibility for their employees’ experiences and realize that they can manage these moments with agility and foresight.

Jon Cairns, VP Technical Services

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The post Hybrid Working Environments and the Impact on IT Effectiveness appeared first on Nexthink.

As odd as it might sound, I think these past few months have done a lot of good for IT, and following the recent news from Nexthink last week, I actually feel optimistic for many enterprises out there that might be struggling.

Hear me out.

Right now, there are millions of people working in new, flexible work environments that didn’t even exist six months ago. And while many IT departments are probably bogged down each week fighting hundreds of micro-battles—like VPN connectivity issues, Windows 10 updates, or Zoom crashes—their companies are realizing just how vital the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is for business continuity and productivity.

Regardless of whether employees connect from home or the office, many in IT are starting to realize there is a deeper issue they need to address:

What employees expect from their digital work environment is often very different from what they receive.

There has always been an “expectations gap” in IT, but the transition to flexible work has now accelerated this problem for many businesses. People nowadays just expect technology to work flawlessly at all times, and though that isn’t necessarily a wild request, it is extremely difficult for IT to match those expectations. Most tech departments are caught in a vicious cycle where they need to deploy complicated rollouts, drive innovation, and eliminate computing problems before employees even notice them—all, mind you, while working with limited resources and tools.

In addition, many IT departments tend to focus their time and resources in the wrong places, which inadvertently deteriorates their relationships with employees. Traditional IT departments worry more about whether their networks and business services are up and running, and less about how people actually consume those services. They typically follow antiquated SLAs that ignore how their digital services are being experienced and received in real-time.

The truth might be ugly but there is hope

It’s important to note that I don’t actually blame IT for any of these problems, if anything, my teammates and I sympathize greatly with their situation.

The truth, however, is that many of the inherent flaws and gaps in traditional IT have serious consequences for employees and businesses. We find that most digital workers suffer around 100 technology interruptions per year, which in a company of 10,000 people can cost up to $25 million—and that’s just in salary costs. For many organizations, IT disruptions also have grave externality costs—tech incidents in a hospital, for instance, could impact the life a patient, or in a security agency, whether a criminal is brought to justice. Many people are also employed by large enterprises which typically struggle with digital experience due to the complexity of their environments.

But even if the scene looks bleak, I feel extremely optimistic and hopeful for two particular reasons:

• It has been proven that companies with higher levels of employee engagement can earn 2.5x more in revenue than competitors with lower engagement (Hay Group), plus an 81% higher customer satisfaction (Gallup). Nexthink primes businesses to achieve outcomes like these by helping IT to eliminate disruptive end-user computing problems and enable employees to work efficiently without technology setbacks.
• The next generation of our cloud-native solutions platform, Nexthink Experience™, truly gives IT the ability to manage their employees’ digital experiences, from diagnosing IT problems in real-time, to solving them at scale and with absolute certainty.

Let’s start first with this last point.

Nexthink Experience helps remove the challenge that IT so often faces after diagnosing a problem. Instead of wondering “now what?”, our customers will get instant access to a summary of root causes and will find accompanying “playbooks” that show exactly how they can resolve those issues.

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“Before Nexthink, we had to search by dichotomy, but now it only takes us a few minutes, and without service interruption.”

Paired with our existing technology stack, IT can unlock complete end-to-end visibility in their entire infrastructure, and drill-down and diagnose incidents using our real-time experience score dashboards. They can also quickly resolve their issues by accessing hundreds of built-in automated remediation scripts, or by reaching out directly to employees with our advanced employee engagement capabilities and on-screen targeting features.

When we talk about DEX with new customers it can sometimes sound abstract for them. Yet once our platform goes to work and IT is able to see it in action, something clicks—our customers realize that they can truly understand and solve problems from the perspective of their employees—a skill that is impossible to replicate with any other technology vendor. Our dynamic network mapping also helps IT connect devices, ports, applications and end users in a single timeline, which enables different IT teams to work off the same information.

“

“I remember one customer’s subnet kept crashing and their IT department couldn’t figure out why. They spent a month on the case, and they had nearly every major technology player looking into their problem. We deployed Nexthink on their devices and within 24 hours they isolated the underlying cause: a single version of their antivirus software.”

The DEX management mind-set

The mind-set our customers take with Nexthink deviates sharply with the current status quo. Rather than concentrate on networks, applications, and devices in isolation, IT can tackle those components cohesively and from one platform.

This approach enables IT to start closing the expectations gap with their employees by truly seeing the way that their IT services are being consumed. Knowing what works and what doesn’t from the employee’s perspective, adds unique context to the way IT works. Finally, enterprise IT can take hold of their infrastructure by getting ahead of problems sooner rather than later and support their employees, no matter where they work.

Jon Cairns, VP Technical Services, Nexthink

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The post IT’s Lifeline – Digital Experience Management for Modern Work appeared first on Nexthink.

Perhaps one of Nexthink’s most endearing qualities is that it has never been a “drink the kool-aid” type of company. Yes, we are proud to be the leading experience management platform in IT, but that honor is most championed from outside, not within.

From its beginnings, Nexthink has been used by enterprise IT to narrow the gap between what employees expect at work and what they receive. Our solutions platform has enabled IT professionals to become truly proactive and agile in the way they solve end user computing problems and manage digital transformation projects.

I met with Nexthink’s CEO & Co-founder, Pedro Bados and several of our executives to learn how Nexthink’s patented technology has been helping hundreds of IT departments crush their most frustrating obstacles, and to understand what businesses today can do to improve their Digital Employee Experience (DEX).

I think we have something special here

Eighteen years ago, Nexthink was just an idea, unlocked from a breakthrough in Bados’ research in advanced artificial intelligence at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. One of the outside reviewers of Pedro’s project was an IT director at a famous watch company, who said the research was so innovative that if it could be turned into a product, he would buy it.

Taking his cue, Pedro acquired two patents and Nexthink was born. It didn’t take long to see this idea deliver some serious business results.

“There’s always been an inherent contradiction in IT—employees experience their digital work environments far differently than how IT perceives them. CIOs are understandably hyper-focused on delivering projects on time and on budget, but that doesn’t have to come at the expense of poor computing experiences”, notes Bados.

“I remember one of our first clients, a large telecom enterprise, spent a month trying to figure out why their subnet kept crashing, why only a 1/3 of their workers could connect to their network, and what apps employees were using when the disruptions hit—they couldn’t answer any of these questions”, recalls Chief Strategy Officer, Yassine Zaied. At first, Zaied was hesitant Nexthink could help. “The customer had some of the biggest players in tech support looking into the issue, so I initially panicked and wondered if we could deliver”. Yet Zaied’s hesitation quickly vanished—just 24 hours after deploying Nexthink on their customer’s devices, IT discovered that a single version of their antivirus software kept connecting to the wrong server and causing the disruption. “I was completely blown away and thought this is something really, really special we have here” recalls Zaied.

“We find that IT too often gets stuck looking at problems in isolation, they focus on their networks, machines, and apps, but in silos. Instead, we want to help IT see their infrastructure through the eyes of their employees, and solve multifaceted issues which span from their devices to their data centers and back again” adds Bados.

Making the right moves based on real-time experience data

Nexthink is often used by IT departments when they are mid-crisis—a deployment goes awry, or employees bombard the helpdesk with tickets—and our platform is quickly put to the test.

Samuele Gantner, Nexthink’s Chief Product Officer recalls how one customer, a North American insurance company, made a software update overnight that almost turned disastrous. The update was made on the company’s VoIP call center, an application which 2,500 insurance agents actively used. Yet this change didn’t carry over on all employee applications and by next morning the company’s agents flooded the helpdesk, panicked by the disruption.

“Without us, their IT department was faced with two terrible choices: continue with the software update (which was clearly not working) or roll it back (which would most likely cause more downtime and potentially cost the company millions). From Nexthink’s dashboards, IT was able to drill-down and discover that only 1 in 10 agents were experiencing problems with their VoIP. Acting on this insight, IT then used Nexthink’s remote actions to carry over the software update for those users that missed out the first time.”

Based on research by Vanson Bourne, we know that IT disruptions can cost a company of 10k employees up to $25 million per year, but figures like these only represent the tip of the iceberg. Jon Cairns, VP of Technical Services, recounts that many enterprise IT departments are dealing with high stakes projects, the ramifications of which can extend well beyond salary costs. “Tech disruptions in a hospital can mean life or death for patients, or a defense agency, the ability to bring criminals to justice—our experience platform is a game-changer for so many enterprise organizations, something that protects their bottom line and safeguards against externality costs.”

Now more than ever

If anything, 2020 has proven that IT’s role is more relevant now than ever before and that employees depend on the same digital experience at home as they once had in the office. “To be honest, nothing has really changed, the situation has just accelerated a need that we’ve all known. Employees are now saying: I deserve a better digital experience!” says Zaied.

But flexible work has certainly placed many IT departments in an uncomfortable situation. Digital workers that once sat onsite could be managed as a single entity, but now they require distinct security and operational support working from home. “One CIO told me that before COVID hit he used to have 6 offices to manage, but now he’s looking after 30,000!” says Bados.

Nexthink’s customers have made the transition to remote work look flawless thanks to our platform’s readiness modules, popular integrations, and on-screen messaging features which are highly effective at collecting employee feedback and sharing important communications.

Gantner adds, “Our customers are able to quickly diagnose problems thanks to our comprehensive Digital Experience score system and dashboarding, and our latest enhancement, Nexthink Experience, helps IT managers prioritize issues and act on them without having to do the heavy lifting”.

Using built-in guided playbooks, IT has access to hundreds of steps that allow them to resolve problems conclusively and without any operational delays. To learn about the different ways Nexthink is solving common IT problems in the modern digital workplace, contact a representative today.

Prefer to see Nexthink Experience in action?

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The post Reputation Matters – Nexthink’s Execs Share Favorite Customer Stories appeared first on Nexthink.

Nexthink is incredibly proud to be able to present yet another installment of our Through the Crisis series, in which our customers share their IT challenges and successes from the COVID-19 crisis.

In this installment, Yves Habersaat (software engineer, BG Consulting Engineers) explains how his organization leveraged Nexthink to affect a significant update of their IT estate during the early stages of the pandemic.

It’s a fascinating example of how some IT teams actually took advantage of the overnight surge in remote working created by the quarantine to accelerate their organization’s technology strategy, and ensure colleagues could thereby continue to be productive wherever they were working from.

For more information on how Nexthink was able to support customers through the COVID-19 crisis, check out this on-demand webinar featuring ABN AMRO and Forrester.

The post Through the Crisis: Nexthink Customer Stories (BG Engineering) appeared first on Nexthink.

Dr. Brennan Jacoby is a philosopher and the founder of Philosophy at Work, an organization that works with businesses seeking to improve their thinking skills by leveraging great philosophers and philosophical techniques.

In 2020, Dr. Jacoby has been busy, not only supporting clients through “interesting times”, but developing a new report on The Virtues of Virtual, which focuses on how organizations can think more clearly about (and thereby thrive in) this new era of vastly expanded flexible, remote, virtual working.

Here he tells us about his work, and how the way we approach technology can help us to get the best value from it.

Tell us about the Virtues of Virtual report?

The report focuses on how we can work really well together even when we’re not together, and how we can thrive as a business in this remote context.

One of the key characteristics of 2020 has been the way it’s forced us to respond to challenges, uncertainty and change. At Philosophy at Work we’ve collaborated with clients on a number of different sessions that showed us that there was a real tendency to respond to change in one of two main ways—to overreact or underreact.

For instance, we’ve encountered a lot of managers who pre-crisis might not have been particularly prone to micromanagement, but post-crisis have responded to the surge in remote and dispersed working by really tightening their style. Often, their teams have responded quite negatively to this switch. Other managers have gone in the opposite direction—they were almost too hands off during the outset of quarantine, and left their teams feeling insufficiently supported.

How should businesses strike the right balance between overreaction and under-reaction?

Well our report title actually comes from the work of Aristotle, who said that the right way to live is to try and strike a balance between extremes: he says that a virtue always strikes that balance between the two.

In our report, we identify five virtues that we think strike a really helpful balance between extremes in virtual workplace environments. These are: democracy, accountability, clarity, collegiality and understanding.

How does moderation impact our engagement with technology?

We interviewed lots of experts, and one of the things that was highlighted was that, while remote or virtual working is characterized hugely by our engagement with tech, what makes the biggest difference isn’t so much the tech we have, but more the way that we use it.

When a company goes virtual, they’re often thinking “well, we’re virtual now because we’re holding out meetings via video conferencing,” or, “we’re doing our learning and development virtually” etc. But this can serve to take our eye from where we really need to be paying attention, which concerns how we’re actually connecting with each other, and what our experience of using the technology is like.

In other words, it’s about humanizing technology through our approach to technology.

For more information on Dr. Jacoby and his work, check out his organization, Philosophy at Work.

To learn about the different ways Nexthink is solving common IT problems in the modern digital workplace, contact a representative today.

Prefer to see the Nexthink Experience platform in action?

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The post Through the Crisis: Nexthink Customer Stories (Philosophy at Work) appeared first on Nexthink.

Nexthink’s Chief Product Officer, Samuele Gantner, spoke recently with Digitalisation World, a popular tech news company to discuss the next generation of our Experience Platform.

IT departments around the world are under considerable stress nowadays but there are several fast and practical solutions available in the Nexthink platform that our customers are using to help support their remote workers and flexible work environments.

Key points from the interview:

(0:25) What’s the main takeaway from the platform?

Nexthink’s platform gives IT the ability to fully understand digital work from the perspective of their employees; and equips IT departments with the insights and means to fix critical technology problems that span across their networks, business applications, and digital devices.

(4:18) “Where do I start?” – helping IT prioritize incidents and drops in performance

This is the question that many in IT ask themselves when it comes time to fix their users most frustrating tech problems. Learn how the platform uses IssueRank™ to help IT prioritize the biggest tech issues that impact a company’s Digital Employee Experience.

Access the full interview here:

(5:45) “How do I fix this?” – automating & guiding what comes next for IT support

In addition, IT doesn’t always have the time or resources to become experts in every facet of tech support. Sam discusses the importance of Nexthink’s playbooks which help guide IT by showing how they can quickly solve performance problems with Nexthink’s built-in automations.

(6:45) Real-time metrics + context-driven employee feedback

By combining real-time network, application, and endpoint metrics with rich employee feedback, Nexthink’s customers are able to pivot at any moment and unearth the root causes that lay at the heart of their IT services.

(12:00) Reactive >>> Proactive >>> Preemptive?

Sam breaks down what it means for IT departments to shift from reactive, to proactive, and a later, more mature stage, of preemptive IT Ops. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will be, if they’re not already, a thing of the past. Instead, IT will look to something else that Sam explains in detail.

(14:40) What else is coming to the Nexthink platform?

Shh… Sam reveals several important enhancements coming to the platform, but you’ll have to check out the video for more details!

To learn about the different ways Nexthink is solving common IT problems in the modern digital workplace, contact a representative today.

Prefer to see the Nexthink Experience platform in action?

Book a demo

The post Nexthink’s CPO, Samuele Gantner Interviewed by Digitalisation World appeared first on Nexthink.

Across almost all industries, IT’s focus has shifted from WFH (Work From Home) to WFA (Work From Anywhere).

Some businesses and organizations might be further along in facilitating flexible work, but it seems like everybody is instinctively starting to rethink both their short and long term management strategies. The education sector, for example, is one industry that is currently taking a hard look at their model by exploring ways to leverage technology solutions that can keep young students engaged and learning.

“There’s no denying that, in the medium term at least, university education is set to become a much more flexible, blended experience for students and educators alike,” explains Matt Hall, Assistant Director of IT at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom.

Here, in the final contribution to our “Through the Crisis” video series, Hall explains how Nexthink supported his team’s adaptation from servicing a campus-based community, to a dispersed one, and what the implications are for the university’s future.

“IT already underpinned most modern organizations of course, and universities were no different,” he added. “It’s a bit like electricity – few notice when it’s working, but when it goes wrong it’s very impactful. That’s even more true when your users are working, or learning, remotely, or flexibly. For students to continue to have great educational and communal experiences in the years to come, proactive IT is going to be crucial.”

To learn about the different ways Nexthink is solving common IT problems in the modern digital workplace, contact a representative today.

Prefer to see the Nexthink Experience platform in action?

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The post Through the Crisis: Nexthink Customer Stories (Bournemouth University) appeared first on Nexthink.

The legal sector is an industry ripe for technological disruption—and so perhaps the perfect place for a visionary CIO such as Slater & Gordon’s Jon Grainger. In advance of the upcoming British Legal Technology Awards, Nexthink caught up with Grainger to hear about how Nexthink Experience (the cloud-native platform for managing Digital Employee Experience) is helping his IT team deliver value and innovation at this “technology-driven” legal firm.

“I’ve long suspected that the ITIL model is bankrupt,” he told us, without wasting a second. “From what I’ve seen, its model is still based on the response coming back from the users. You don’t do anything—you wait. Nexthink allows us to be much more proactive.”

Watch How Nexthink Optimization Works

Grainger insists today’s fluctuating digital environments demand this proactive approach—something Nexthink Experience is uniquely able to provide. “The pace of change we’ve got now is sort of instantaneous. If your support system can’t scale, you’re going to have trouble keeping up.”

Nexthink: You’ve been one of the first users of Nexthink Experience. How has this made a difference in your ability to deliver business value?

Jon Grainger:  I think if you did a straw poll of CIOs today, you’d find they have less problem managers than they’d like. The magic with Nexthink Experience is that it doesn’t just give us insights, but recommendations and actual engineering suggestions.

This means that, if I’m on the service desk, not only am I getting a specific fix suggested to me, and the chance to standardize and fix the problem out of the system, but it’s actually conveying engineering knowledge to the service desk, too.

This is an incredible advance. Going forward, Nexthink Experience could disrupt the way support is delivered. For my team, it allows us to free up more time and resources to help the business innovate.

How does Nexthink fit with the “technology driven” culture at Slater & Gordon?

When we look at a problem today, we talk about putting forward a hypothesis. This approach creates an engineering culture where everyone’s mind is open to the different possible solutions. Nexthink gives us the data to support this approach.

Also, the user voice is something that’s previously been missing in IT. Nexthink is critical in ensuring that user feedback is a big part of our processes at Slater & Gordon.

How is Nexthink helping you communicate IT’s strategic value to the wider business?

I’ve been in lots of situations where you try to present to the business: things like the average response times for the service desk, or how much the backlog is growing. But these tend to be the metrics technology teams need to be invested in internally. They rarely actually mean anything to a business user.

Business users want to know: is our staff happy? Are our tools enabling them to be useful?

Our Nexthink DEX Scores—which we work hard to ensure are consistently high—allow us to submit an almost itemized experience bill for how the business is consuming IT, aligned with user feedback. What we’re aiming for at S&G is to create parity between our employees and our consumers. Nexthink Experience is a vital part of that evolution.

Tell us about Slater and Gordon’s “Work Anywhere” ethos and how this was successfully implemented over the lockdown?

“Work Anywhere” means delivering a digital equivalence to being in the office. It makes technology go into the fabric of what we do. We don’t notice it. It’s there and it’s helping us. Getting this successfully implemented involved a lot of steps.

We were doing testing for Teams, putting together the basic Teams template, working with HR in terms of adoption, working with accommodation in terms of kits, and working with all the practice areas in terms of getting the feedback for what they wanted. We were also explaining to folks how to use Teams, how to get through Zoom fatigue, and we even rolled out a different way of accessing technical support called the Tech Bar. And of course, we put in a whole raft of measures through Nexthink—which is how we’re able to see when our users have got a problem before they even know they’ve got a problem.

To learn more about the ways you can manage the trials and tribulations that come with a dispersed workforce, tune into a joint webinar hosted by CMSwire, Slater & Gordon, Nexthink, and IDC on Tuesday, September 29 at 11am ET/ 4pm BST/ 5pm CEST.

Register here!

The post Slater & Gordon Lawyers on Nexthink Experience appeared first on Nexthink.

We’re proud to announce that Nexthink has been named, once again, as a leading technology vendor in Gartner’s latest Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). More than ever, the topics in the guide are striking a chord for many Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) leaders. According to Gartner, in the first few months of 2020 inquiries for end-user experience grew five times compared to 2019. They also predict that by 2025, 70% of digital business initiatives will require I&O leaders to report on business metrics from digital experience, up from less than 15% today.

Why all the interest in DEM?

Two key reasons:

• Post-Pandemic Relevancy– 2020 has left many I&O leaders clamoring for better visibility into their organizations’ endpoint, connectivity, and application performance. The new “work from anywhere” model has sparked more interest in understanding what employees truly experience while working remotely and using different resources (VPN, VDI, home WiFi, etc.).
• Clear Business Outcomes– This year’s guide loudly echoes what we’ve known for some time here at Nexthink: that superior digital experience solutions can help prevent IT issues and positively impact real business outcomes like employee productivity, revenue, churn, NPS scores and much more.

DEM Technologies: A Key Player in IT Monitoring

According to Gartner, DEM technologies “monitor the availability, performance and quality of experience an end user or digital agent receives as they interact with an application and the supporting infrastructure.” As noted in Gartner’s previous Market Guide, cloud computing can at times leave IT with less control and visibility over their infrastructure, creating a void that the right DEM solution can happily fill.

{What is DEM exactly?}

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) tools often encounter monitoring gaps with regards to device, internet routing, DNS and other infrastructure and network related problems—but DEM solutions can help shine a light on these areas and unlock unique end-user and device-specific insights.

Understanding how people use their digital tools and IT services can be enlightening, but we like to take DEM several steps further. With proactive alerts, automated remediations, targeted employee engagement campaigns and experience scoring in real-time, we can help thousands of IT departments improve their employees’ digital experiences.

Managing the Digital Experience & Impacting Real Business Outcomes

Later in the guide, Gartner describes several ways DEM solutions can enable organizations to deliver tangible business outcomes via technological means. We won’t reveal those examples here but we found ourselves nodding in agreement because our cloud-native solution has made similar strides in addressing our customers’ unique business goals.

In particular, we’ve helped IT departments save thousands of hours in manual work and labor costs; we’ve helped teams repurpose hundreds of perfectly healthy devices; and we’ve helped businesses smoothly transition their office-based workers offsite in rapid time.

We know IT can widen their scope beyond SLAs and technical metrics to positively impact real business outcomes that protect one’s bottom line, reputation, and employee productivity. And we’re pleased to see others advocate this perspective as well.

For more information on how IT departments are using the Nexthink platform click here.

Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring, 25 August 2020, By Federico De Silva, Charley Rich, Josh Chessman

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Nexthink Named in Gartner’s Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) appeared first on Nexthink.

Remote and flexible working isn’t just changing where we work, it’s changing how we work.

“The vision is changing, the game is changing,” explains Yasser Fouad Ramadan (Deputy General Manager, Head of IT Governance at Banque du Caire). “The new dynamic between organizations and employees is going to be less about coming into the office, and more about delivering milestones.”

Ramadan recently joined Harish Dunakhe (Research Director, Software and Cloud, IDC META) and Jon Cairns (Vice President, Technical Services, Nexthink) for a fascinating discussion hosted by IDC. Shortly before, Nexthink had the opportunity to catch up with Ramadan to hear more about IT’s role in this changing workplace, both during the lockdown and beyond.

Nexthink: Why is Digital Employee Experience important to Banque du Caire?

Yasser Fouad Ramadan: We’re always focused on providing firsts. We want our customers to have services with us that simply aren’t available to them anywhere else. Technology is a huge part of that. Today, for example, we are providing advanced yet simple mobile banking solutions, including diverse Mobile Wallets, which demonstrates our commitment to delighting customers and contributing to the customer experience.

One of the core strategies driving our digital transformation is around employee experience and allowing our supercharged IT teams to take the best possible care of the bank employees serving our customers. We know that the more we empower IT teams to deliver seamless world class support, the more we’ll be able to provide a superb experience to the bank’s customers.

How well prepared was Banque du Caire for the upsurge of remote work this year?

Nexthink was already closely monitoring the experience of work-from-home users. Following the COVID-19 lockdown this became especially valuable. We had people working from home and could rest assured knowing they were already supported. We had full visibility of their service quality and could automate their support.

By giving you full visibility of the end user experience, Nexthink opens the communication channels between IT and the user base. Nexthink provides our technology teams with different dashboards that allow us to identify whether or not a user is happy with their service, where the bottlenecks are and what we can do about them. Once you’ve opened up the lines of communication with your users, and can know with confidence what they’re actually experiencing, you’re in a great position to improve their service quality.

Can you share a use case where this level of visibility was helpful to the wider business?

Just this month we had significant complaints about machines running too slowly. With Nexthink we found out that more than 1,000 machines were reported for slow performance. Nexthink was able to dig out the exact binary and .exe related to one of the security updates we’d recently rolled out. The team opened the case with the vendor and the vendor then provided a patch that resolved the issues and restored all machines to their normal processing power on the same day.

How has the ability to support a highly dispersed user base affected IT’s standing at Banque du Caire?

Due to its role in facilitating remote work for many employees, IT was made to feel like Banque du Caire’s champions and heroes during the lockdown. Our work was important and appreciated by our colleagues.

The bank was able to run with a percentage working from home versus the minimal number of people that had to be in the office, with the same and even higher productivity standards.

Top management also appreciates and understands the need to have a remote virtual environment that people can run anywhere. At this stage, IT becomes a service and business enabler, rather than a support function.

To learn about the different ways Nexthink is solving common IT problems in the modern digital workplace, contact a representative today.

Prefer to see the Nexthink Experience platform in action?

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The post Banque du Caire: Delivering Technology Firsts to Customers & Employees appeared first on Nexthink.

I think I have been reading way too many “doom and gloom” articles this year about IT. For many companies, the switch to a prolonged work-from-anywhere (WFA) model has exposed serious cracks within their IT infrastructure. To be honest though, the cards have been stacked against IT for some time and 2020 was just the tipping point. Employees often resist new work technologies and there’s mounting evidence to prove that IT tends to overestimate how well their services are received.

But I want to share with you a recent story that should inspire some hope and optimism for anybody working in an IT role.

Too often, L1 and L2 agents can find themselves bogged down in reactive tickets, troubleshooting tricky network errors or device issues long after they’ve already impacted employees. This particular customer, who is a large global insurance firm, was able to root out hundreds of hours of reactive support work and thousands of dollars in labor costs with the help of Nexthink’s Digital Experience dashboards and proactive capabilities.

The following is a glimpse into some of the results they achieved over an eight-month period (January – August 2020):

1) Proactively clearing around 200 TB of disk space every week

In the beginning of 2020, Nexthink’s dashboards revealed that this customer’s device performance deteriorated dramatically whenever an employee device reached a threshold of 5 GB in its C drive and 500 MB in its temp folder. As a result, employees working both onsite and remotely experienced file-sharing delays and slow load times with their business applications.

Turning to Nexthink’s self-help remediations, IT was able to send weekly targeted on-screen messages to employees before they maxed out their disk space. After six months, IT had cleaned up to 200 TB of disk space from a few hundred devices. By setting an automatic script to run continuously each week, IT was able to get ahead of potential device problems and subsequent calls into the help desk. In addition, the relevant and timely context in which these on-screen messages arrived left employees feeling supported and undisturbed from their daily computing tasks.

2) Proactively preventing Windows Telemetry from causing +30 second delays in Outlook 

Thanks to Nexthink’s Digital Experience Score (DEX Score), IT was able to quickly identify a spike in Outlook launch times and determine the contributing factor: a single telemetry executable.

Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry (CompatTelRunner.exe) is a service responsible for gathering telemetry and diagnostics data from the computer as part of this customer’s user experience improvement program. Unfortunately, Nexthink’s dashboards revealed a direct correlation between this particular executable and their slow Outlook launch times. In particular, IT found this one executable impacted 206,000 devices and created 121.7 GB per month of web traffic.

Proactively shutting down this telemetry service prevented thousands of Outlook launches from going awry, and thus, saved IT and their users precious time with troubleshooting.

3) Reduction in BSOD instances by 44%

Like many IT teams are discovering this year, the switch to a WFA model can make it especially difficult to understand when employees experience device issues. Back in the office, an employee is more likely to ask for help and have a support agent stop by their desk to resolve their problem. That scenario of course changes the minute you move an employee into a remote working environment.

This customer was able to solve this type of problem by using Nexthink’s endpoint monitoring dashboards to identify roughly 800 devices that experienced multiple daily Blue Screens of Death (BSODs).

Specifically, our drill-down features revealed that two error labels, DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE and VIDEO_SCHEDULER_INTERNAL_ERROR were the two major contributors behind these BSODs. Taking the complete BSOD error message and codes, IT’s DSS location team was able to quickly update the necessary drivers on the affected devices. This intervention helped save IT’s help desk roughly 45 minutes (average MTTR) of troubleshooting for every employee, as well as countless minutes in unreported downtime for those employees that used to silently tolerate these annoying disruptions!

4) Reducing Privileged Access Management Crashes by 66%

This customer also wanted to ensure their dispersed workforce was properly protected from cybersecurity threats, regardless of where users logged in from.

Nexthink’s dashboards enabled IT to track the number of times their privileged access management crashed and to isolate the root causes. Once again, Nexthink’s drill-down capabilities helped IT pinpoint several executables that were contributing to the crashes, and their cybersecurity team was able to quickly apply a fix based on this information.

5) Improving Overall Device and OS Stability by 3% over 3 months

IT also sought to improve their overall device and OS stability so that employees could remain focused and productive, no matter where they worked from.

Nexthink’s DEX Score enabled IT to benchmark their device and OS stability and investigate specific errors that affected their scores. IT was able to drill-down and deploy Nexthink’s built-in automations to help fix the following issues:

Two common themes emerged from Nexthink’s insights: certain browser versions were erratic and non-compatible, and many of the drivers in their employees’ devices were outdated and needed updates.

6) Successfully blocked unwanted USB Storage and Tethering on 110K desktops & Bluetooth tethering on 51k laptops

IT was also concerned with preventing any potential data loss coming from unwarranted and unapproved connections. Nexthink granted IT the ability to identify any connections in real time and trigger automations at scale to successfully block any storage access and tethering across 110k desktops and 51K laptops.

7) Always On VPN (AOVPN) client made accessible in 326 devices, provides huge time savings for IT

Soon after this customer shifted most of their employees to a WFA model, IT had to change the VPN settings for several hundred laptops to help facilitate a migration from Direct Access (DA) to the Device Tunnel (DT). Turning to other tools like SCCM for this activity, would have forced IT to allocate a massive amount of time and resources to properly package and deploy their scripts.

Instead, they used Nexthink’s built-in remediations to help clean up their DA and facilitate firewall rules to support their DT configuration. The most important part is that all of this activity occurred behind the scenes without impacting employees.

If your IT department is eager to improve their WFA program and they seek tangible, proactive solutions, then contact a Nexthink representative today.

Prefer to see the Nexthink Experience platform in action?

Book a demo

The post 7 Wins That Helped IT Save its Work-From-Anywhere Program appeared first on Nexthink.

In February 2020, Nexthink introduced its new design system, Apollo. While it unveiled some great new accessibility and design features, its true raison d’être was everything happening on the back-end, a powerful new design engine to scale and accelerate the roll-out of new features.

Well, 6 months later and here we are.

As promised, this latest round of enhancements offers several intuitive modifications to make IT’s life easier when supporting the Digital Employee Experience. Here’s what’s new with the latest Apollo design features:

New navigation and organization

The most apparent and exciting change is the new navigation interface. A new vertical, left-side tray now frees up screen space with its sleek look. This allows users to easily jump to their different platform features and streamline access to actionable employee experience insights.

The tray opens up a more organized dashboard menu with an itemized, practical drop-down of action items IT can take. This intuitive design allows users to seamlessly navigate to and from their preferred dashboard and custom content.

Stronger Experience Optimization

Customers will also quickly discover an important new feature in their Experience Optimization dashboard.

In addition to the Overall Experience view, users will now be able to navigate to 4 new dashboards for each of their DEX Score breakdowns: Device, Productivity and Collaboration, Business Applications, and Employee Sentiment.

This powerful new scoping capability allows additional filtering to assist IT with proactive investigations. Ultimately, this enhancement will improve the accuracy and speed in which IT teams can prioritize their remediation steps.

For example, let’s say IT wants to focus their attention on fixing underperforming Windows 10 Pro 1903 software for remote users in New York City. With Experience Optimization, they can drill down into their employees’ technical problems, and receive guided steps to remediate any critical issues.

All done in just a few clicks.

Sharper Engage Dashboard Filtering

The Engage Campaign dashboard provides an automated report of each Engage campaign. Now, users can filter campaign results by answers to easily define any correlation between each question.

In the example above, IT filters for the results of a work-from-anywhere (WFA) satisfaction campaign to better understand employees that are experiencing application-related issues.

Change is coming

This is only the beginning. We have many new features and updates planned to help IT departments more efficiently manage their Digital Employee Experience.

Discover these new features in our latest release, coming out September 24th!

Not a customer yet? See Nexthink Experience in Action!

The post Nexthink Further Enhances UI for Experience Platform appeared first on Nexthink.

A Gartner poll released earlier this year predicted that roughly half of all enterprise employees will likely work remotely (at least part of the time) post-COVID. That’s probably a welcomed sign for those that have settled into remote or hybrid work models, but surprisingly, businesses and institutions are still struggling to avoid major IT blunders that impact these digital workers.

In early 2020, millions of European workers were kicked off MS Teams due to an unexpected crash, and we’ve recently seen thousands of American schoolchildren encounter significant IT disruptions since the start of the school year. In addition, there is growing evidence that most work-from-anywhere (WFA) models continue to exacerbate IT’s problems and workload.

You might be wondering: why are so many IT departments struggling right now?

Many of IT’s problems have to do with their inherent limitations in measuring and managing the way devices are experienced by end users. From Nexthink’s perspective, we call this the Digital Employee Experience (DEX)—a comprehensive index that scores hard IT metrics and sentiment feedback from real employees.

We want to share three recent IT successes from a prominent pharmaceutical company to underscore how tech teams can use a DEX approach to prevent annoying end-user IT problems. Like most companies did in 2020, this customer shifted the majority of its employees offsite, and they plan on keeping it that way well into next year.

Tired with facing the same types of crashes cited in the news, this customer used Nexthink’s DEX Scoring and Experience platform to better manage and monitor their digital infrastructure.

Here is what they were able to accomplish:

1. Slicing AutoCAD crashes by 98.76%

Several engineers and drug specialists relied heavily upon AutoCAD, an application which enables users to draft detailed renderings of their products. Unfortunately, a certain AutoCAD version continuously crashed at the backend and IT was unaware because employees never reported the problem.

Using Nexthink’s detailed software monitoring dashboards and experience scores, IT was able to quickly identify and resolve the issue with their AutoCAD support team. The fast turnaround helped the company’s engineers and drug specialists avoid prolonged productivity loss.

2. Cutting Internet Explorer crashes in half in a single quarter

Employees also experienced another blow with Internet Explorer (IE). IT encouraged employees to use IE for their web browsing, but certain versions continually triggered crashes in several remote devices.

Leveraging Nexthink’s extensive content library (which includes a wide range of remediation scripts), IT was able to quickly upgrade to the latest version of IE for those impacted devices. They still use Nexthink’s alerts and DEX scoring to monitor any drops in performance. If their IE score drops below a certain level, IT is alerted and they can proactively intervene and support their employees’ web browsing experiences.

3. Resolving VPN Agent crashes by 100%

Since the pandemic this customer has also had to rely more on their VPN to support both remote and travelling workers. During the first few months of 2020, several network crashes prevented users from successfully connecting and accessing their internal corporate applications.

Nexthink’s dynamic network mapping and experience dashboards allowed IT to quickly isolate the main culprits behind the crashes: two legacy VPN Agent versions.

Nexthink’s network mapping allows IT to get a dynamic look across their devices, users, ports, binaries, and destinations. Support agents can quickly identify root-causes and better understand their employee experience.

By quickly upgrading to the latest VPN versions from Nexthink’s library, IT was able to slash their overall network crashes and protect their distributed workforce from further disruptions.

Dhruv Kapila, Partner Success Manager

Kapil Kumar, Senior Delivery Consultant

If your IT department is eager to improve their WFA program and they seek tangible, proactive solutions, then contact a Nexthink representative today.

Prefer to see the Nexthink Experience platform in action?

Book a demo

The post Stop the Crashes! Pharma Company Wisely Repairs IT Issues appeared first on Nexthink.

Like many in IT, I am a big fan of Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). It’s one of those tools that you can’t really go without: it can help locate your company’s servers, desktops and mobile devices; it helps install client software, patch updates (see Microsoft Patch Tuesday); and it protects your endpoints and access control tools.

All good things, but…

Sometimes our beloved SCCM needs a little backup—like Robin to Batman.

Disabled devices, enabled frustrations

A few months ago, one of our customers in the financial services industry came to us needing significant help fixing their devices. After logging into SCCM, support agents noticed that roughly 15% of their employee devices were not reporting to SCCM and became inactive, a common problem familiar to many in IT. Nonetheless, this subset of disabled devices created a serious vulnerability because SCCM couldn’t initiate the latest Windows security updates.

Watch how quickly Nexthink can resolve compliance issues for IT.

With the issue brewing below the surface, IT faced another dilemma:

In the pre-COVID world, IT used to resolve this problem by sending their support agents out to assist employees at their physical workstations. Typically, it would take an agent 5 – 10 minutes to successfully takeover and re-enable an employee’s device. This type of intervention wasn’t as disruptive back when employees met face-to-face. The employee could take a few minutes to grab a cup of coffee or go chat up a friend, and the issue would be fixed when he or she returned.

Now IT had to throw that entire process out the window. With the staff working from home, IT would be forced to remote-in and manually fix the affected devices. This time around, IT wouldn’t be able to use any visual clues before approaching employees. They couldn’t tell somebody to take a break and stroll around the office while they worked on a fix. For remote workers, their laptop, desktop, or mobile device is the office.

Automating fixes for better SCCM support

Luckily, the IT team was able to use Nexthink’s library of built-in automations to fix the affected devices in the background. Nexthink’s powerful integration with SCCM has enabled this IT team to quickly retrieve missing client status information and proactively resolve any issues at scale. As you can imagine, this has saved significant time on IT’s side and allowed their remote employees to work without any annoying disruptions.

What Nexthink automations do our customers use?

Here is a list of powerful scripts that complement SCCM:

Get/Restore SCCM Client Status

• This script will retrieve and restore SCCM-related client services status (SMS Agent, BITS, WMI, etc.) and information on devices.

Invoke SCCM Client Auto-repair

• This script executes the Configuration Manager repair based on Microsoft’s script center recommendations.

Start task sequence

• This script triggers any SCCM Task Sequence, application or program, based on its ID.

For more information on Nexthink’s integration with SCCM, click here.

Tiago Antão, Solution Consulting Director, Nexthink

If your IT department is eager to improve their work-from-anywhere (WFA) program and they seek tangible, proactive solutions, then contact a Nexthink representative today.

Prefer to see the Nexthink Experience platform in action?

Book a demo

The post Backing SCCM With Smart IT Experience Automations appeared first on Nexthink.

When employees are faced with a tedious IT ticket process—especially for non-critical issues—most would rather suffer in silence. In fact, an independent survey recently uncovered that only 55% of employee incidents are actually reported to IT. This silence can create significant challenges for IT, in terms of the effect on employees (frustration and productivity losses) and outcomes for IT (poor employee perception of IT, increased risk of project failures, reactive problem solving and more).

This is where ongoing and proactive management of employee experience can make a real difference. A focus on experience can help IT deliver more effective incident management by allowing them to detect and resolve hidden issues, without waiting on employees to report them.

Let’s look at one specific aspect of proactive IT management: automated self-help. That is, getting employees involved in the remediation process using targeted engagement and automated healing.

The power of analytics + sentiment + automation

Imagine you experience an IT issue. But before you consider whether or not to contact IT, a message pops up on your device letting you know that IT is aware of the problem and better still—you are prompted to resolve the issue with one simple click. Invisible to you as an employee, an automated remote action is deployed to fix the issue instantly, requiring no IT involvement.

Now imagine this same scenario performed at scale, across the entire enterprise.

Nexthink customers are making this a reality through the synergy of three key capabilities:

• Real-time, event-level visibility and analytics to identify the source of experience degradation.
• A hyper-targeted employee engagement channel to reach out to the right people, at the right time, with the right message.
• Automated remediation at scale to seamlessly resolve IT issues quickly and effectively.

Each of those features has immense value on its own. But when combined, these capabilities become a powerful weapon for IT. And the best example of that is automated self-help that proactively resolves issues at scale, while keeping the employee involved and aware.

Here are three recent examples from Nexthink customers.

1) Helping employees to help themselves

Low system free space is often referred to as a silent killer of employee experience as it can create performance issues without employees realizing why. This can quickly escalate to increased ticket count, complex troubleshooting and deteriorating device experience. In addition, low space can lead to software compliance issues as system updates cannot be properly installed.

Well aware of this problem, a global financial company created a custom Nexthink dashboard to monitor the available disk space of every device across their landscape. Whenever a device crossed a defined threshold of 10GB of free space, a targeted engagement campaign—such as the one below—would be deployed to the impacted employee(s).

If the employee accepted, a remote action was deployed in the background to clear the recycle bin and temporary files on the targeted device, without IT intervention. In a matter of days, this self-help campaign cleared up hundreds of GB of disk space and dramatically reduced disk-clean-up tickets across the enterprise.

Considering that it previously took around 15 minutes per device to manually clean each disk, the customer could quickly link the self-help campaign to significant productivity increases across the organization.

2) IT and employees working as a team

This global mining company noticed a sudden drop in its overall DEX Score, attributed to a drop in device performance.  A quick analysis showed that over 7,000 devices were experiencing high memory usage. Further investigation revealed some interesting facts:  about 50% of those devices had not rebooted in more than 7 days, and 15% had a direct correlation between this lack of reboot and high memory usage. These devices were not receiving critical OS updates, which resulted in performance issues.

To resolve this issue and improve their employees’ device experience, the customer deployed a highly targeted self-help campaign to those employees that were experiencing high memory usage and still needed to reboot their devices. This campaign not only brought the issue to each user’s attention but also allowed the employee to restart the device themselves through an automated action.

Straight away, IT observed that device performance—and the overall DEX Score—increased for over 700 devices. In the past, it took the support team approximately 30 minutes per device to reach out and negotiate with an employee to restart and update their device. The powerful combination of employee engagement and self-help automation instantly saved 350 hours of IT overhead.

3) Prioritizing collaboration in the flexible workplace

In July 2020, a global manufacturing company noticed a sudden MS Teams stability issue, mainly across Surface Pro devices. With remote working having become so critical, this was unacceptable.

IT identified the root cause as a recent update causing MS Teams to start GPU acceleration, resulting in an MS Teams crash.

The customer quickly tailored a custom engagement campaign targeting 324 affected devices which empowered employees to resolve the issue themselves. With the user’s consent, a remote action was triggered to disable MS Teams’ GPU hardware acceleration on the device. Since this required an application restart, IT made sure to give targeted users a 10 minute delay to give them time to close any open documents.

The result?

A 78% reduction in MS Teams crashes across targeted devices, quickly restoring their collaboration and productivity score to acceptable levels.

Proactive management of employee digital experience

Nexthink Engage offers a targeted IT-to-employee engagement channel to gather and correlate sentiment data, as well as communicating key IT information to drive awareness and adoption. Nexthink Act combines powerful custom data retrieval and remediation capabilities, enabling IT teams to proactively solve employee issues in a reliable and automated manner.

Combining the power of Act and Engage allows IT to proactively deploy flexible and scalable automated self-help to resolve issues with minimal effort. Self-help has saved Nexthink customers from significant hours of productivity loss, and it has dramatically reduced their operational costs.

And it also has a softer impact on employee experience, which is just as important. Beyond fixing their issues, self-help keeps employees aware and involved in the IT process, reminding them that IT is there to support them, even at a distance.

Book a demo to find out how you can efficiently deploy self-help automation across your enterprise using Act and Engage from Nexthink.
 

The post How IT & Employees Can Work Better Together appeared first on Nexthink.

The latest Nexthink release has rolled out, and we couldn’t be more excited to help you go broader and deeper to solve even more digital experience challenges. What exactly do we mean?

End-user computing involves an enormous array of technologies that interact to deliver services to employees—from devices and the operating systems that run on them, to virtual desktops, applications (local and SaaS), and the networks that enable these services.  With our newest release, we help you identify, prioritize and remediate more issues—through deeper visibility across a broader set of platforms.

The release includes powerful advances for improving experience in virtual desktop environments, slick new navigation, further enhancements to Experience Optimization, a single unified DEX score across Windows and MacOS, and a host of other features and enhancements. Let’s jump into the details!

Desktop Virtualization Advancements

With the adoption of desktop virtualization increasing due to remote working and other factors, it can be even more challenging for IT teams to monitor and manage employee experience in VDI and SBC environments. End-user computing, service desk, and digital experience teams often struggle to answer:

• Are my employees that use virtualization having issues they’re not reporting?
• How can we proactively identify and resolve emerging problems?
• When issues occur, are the issues related to virtualization?
• Can we pinpoint and resolve the cause of the issue?

Fortunately, Nexthink just delivered rich new capabilities for answering these questions.  Starting with Citrix, we’ve released new capabilities for monitoring VDI and SBC deployments at a granular level, giving IT deep insight into employee experience for both virtual and physical desktops.

For example, imagine you want to deploy desktop virtualization but are concerned about the potential impact on employees.  You decide to run a pilot and compare the overall digital experience of the pilot virtual desktops vs. your physical desktops.  With Nexthink, you get deep visibility into technical metrics across the two groups, with the ability to investigate issues all the way down to the event level.

In the following example, we see that the CPU and memory usage of the virtual desktops just spiked, indicating an issue that needs to be addressed.

Nexthink also identifies which applications on those virtual desktops are using the most CPU resource.  In this case, a payroll application is the top cause, as shown below.  When a new version of the application was rolled out to the virtual desktops, the team had forgotten to disable graphical acceleration, leading to excessive CPU usage—a problem that can be easily solved.

Once the organization is ready to move from pilot to production deployment of desktop virtualization, a prime concern is monitoring employee experience with the new environment and identifying issues in real-time, rather than waiting for employees to report problems.  With Nexthink Engage, you can capture employee sentiment and correlate it with technical metrics to spot issues quickly and solve them before they become significant.

When virtual desktop users do encounter problems, Nexthink can help you identify if the problems are likely related to the network or virtual infrastructure.  In the following example, we see a sudden drop in the Digital Experience Score for those using VDI devices.

Looking further, we see that the Citrix RTT just fell dramatically, but the network latency was unchanged, suggesting a problem with the virtual machines, not the network.

Finally, the event-level data for one of the affected virtual desktops shows that a new binary was installed right before the virtual desktop’s CPU usage spiked and the user’s experience score fell into the red.

With this information, the IT team has the insight to identify a solution: roll back the binary to a previous version or make other changes to prevent excessive CPU utilization.  Best of all, the problem is identified and solved proactively, without waiting for employees to report the issue.  This is just a taste of the desktop virtualization capabilities in this new release.

New Navigation and Organization

We have introduced an exciting new navigation interface. A new vertical, left-side tray now frees up screen space with its sleek look. This allows users to easily jump to different platform features and streamline access to actionable employee experience insights.

The tray opens up a more organized dashboard menu with an itemized, practical drop-down of action items IT can take. The intuitive design allows users to seamlessly navigate to and from their preferred dashboard and custom content.

Read more about the latest navigation enhancements here.

Experience Optimization Dashboards

The release of Experience Optimization this summer has received positive feedback from our customers. The prioritized, guided process for proactively managing digital employee experience allows IT to focus on the right issues, prioritize the right actions to take, and remediate problems quickly and effectively.

We have now introduced four new dashboards supporting additional drill-down into different aspects of the overall DEX Score. You can navigate separately across Device, Productivity and Collaboration, Business Applications and Employee Sentiment views – allowing you to better prioritize critical areas of improvement and initiate even more focussed remediation playbook actions.

This powerful new scoping capability allows additional filtering to assist IT with proactive investigations. Ultimately, this enhancement will improve the accuracy and speed with which IT teams can prioritize their remediation steps.

Engage dashboard filtering

Customers have been using the Engage campaigns dashboard to proactively manage how they are engaging with employees in a highly targeted and contextual fashion.

This release sees the introduction of interactive filters to the campaigns dashboard. This allows users to filter campaign results by answers to quickly identify any correlation between different question responses, bringing increased focus to the success of each individual campaign and providing immediate insight into how to continuously improve engagement through subsequent campaigns.

Unified Experience Score & Optimization across Windows and macOS devices

We receive regular feedback from our customers on how they are using Nexthink to provide a single pane of glass view across their entire estate, and to drive issue identification and remediation independently of endpoint OS.

This capability has become even more powerful with a new unified DEX Score that allows you to measure and score performance and experience across your macOS and Windows devices. You now have one view of your entire estate.

This unified view is also supported within Experience Optimization to ensure that you can quickly drive issue prioritization and proactive remediation in an aggregated fashion across both platforms.

New Library content

We continue to expand our extensive Library of pre-built content tailored for specific technologies and use cases.

From a collaboration perspective, we’ve added a brand new Webex specific library pack: Webex Operate.  IT teams can now ensure an effective Webex service deployment, monitor its usage and stability and understand the performance and network activity of devices running the application. In addition, the MS Teams Health pack has been upgraded with new dashboards and MacOS support.

As mentioned earlier, we are deploying rich new capabilities through our library for users working with virtualized environments. Firstly, we’ve updated and combined all of our planning and migration content into a single Virtualization: Project pack, providing key insights and capabilities—pre to post-migration—for users moving to a virtualized landscape. For users already virtualized, our Virtualization: Operate pack has been significantly upgraded with new dashboards and metrics for Citrix RTT and virtual latency. In addition, a new Virtualization – Citrix Advanced pack has been released with key remote actions and investigations, with a version for Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) following next week.

Evidently, this is just a fraction of the continuous additions and updates to the Nexthink Library. To explore the full list and see if there’s anything that might interest you, visit our Library page.

New content on the horizon

We will be introducing a wide array of additional content, features and capabilities in Nexthink in the coming months. Check-in with us regularly to see how Nexthink can help you drive proactive improvement of employee experience across your organization.

Interested in seeing Nexthink in action?

Book a demo today.

The post Going Broad & Deep to Optimize Experience With The Newest Nexthink Release appeared first on Nexthink.