For us, IT is a place where people genuinely try to “walk the walk.” Many in this industry are perceptive and curious individuals, constantly on the pursuit for better insights and more efficiency. You cannot survive long in an IT department if you hide behind unmet promises or have an aversion for detail. Facts outweigh opinions, and theories are to be questioned and proven true.

Undoubtedly, these past few months have favored those IT teams that can prove their worth in a time of crisis. Below is a series of tricky questions one customer was able to solve using Nexthink’s experience dashboarding, automations, and employee outreach capabilities. Learn how you can successfully manage a distributed staff by avoiding common pitfalls like password expirations, poor network connectivity, limited employee visibility and more.

What does success look like for IT & our business?

For many IT departments the shift to a work-from-anywhere (WFA) model this year has complicated their business strategy and definition of success. How does one’s data centers, networks, business services, and devices all impact an employee’s digital experience? How can IT track their efforts reconciling problems in say, Skype or Excel, and chart those interventions in a single path forward for benchmarking?

These are the types of questions our customer was able to answer using Nexthink’s Digital Experience Score (DEX)—a comprehensive index that scores hard IT metrics and sentiment feedback from real employees on a scale of 1-10. IT was able to trace each intervention to their overall DEX Score, and drill-down into its components to investigate opportunities for improvement.

Are my employees’ devices ready to go remote or come back to the office?

It can be tricky sometimes for IT teams to properly assess whether their employees are ready to move to a new tech environment. They often have to pull up separate tools to understand whether their devices, firewalls, VPN agents, and collaboration tools are compliant. And housing all of this data in a single location and in a clear format can sometimes take hours, if not days, to infer anything useful.

Rather than waste time trying to consolidate all of their key metrics, this IT team was able to quickly leverage Nexthink’s readiness assessment dashboards. From a single vantage point, IT was able to identify any compliance issues across their devices, and quickly intervene with a fix. The region-by-region breakdown enabled IT to scan their entire digital infrastructure and target specific locations that required more attention than others.

From Nexthink’s dashboards, IT was also able to identify which VPN certificates had been disabled during the company’s move to remote work. Previously, when the company was onsite IT didn’t have to worry about this problem. Nexthink was able to proactively pin-point which certificates were present, and which were soon to be expire. The team’s solution owner was thrilled to have this level of insight, and he quickly worked on a fix for those users that were unable to successfully connect to the company’s VPN.

Are my employees using the latest versions from IT?

Thanks to Nexthink’s version control dashboards, IT was also able to quickly identify any outdated OS builds, firewalls, and VPN versions that could impact an employee’s work experience. By shoring up their version disparity, both remote and in-office workers were able to avoid fewer bugs because they were working with the latest application tools.

And IT was able to identify that 3% of their remote employees’ devices were unprotected with BitLocker. This type of encryption was key to safeguard against data security leaks and prevent certificate errors from hampering the functionality behind certain business apps. Turning to Nexthink’s remote actions, IT was able to quickly enable this subset of unprotected devices.

Does my in-office crew receive a different digital experience than my remote workers?

The IT team was able to quickly see that their remote workers received a lower DEX than their in-office employees. In fact, they discovered the poor DEX score was attributed to:

• Business Apps: ~30% lower than Office Workers
• Device Score: ~7% lower than Office Workers
• Web Browsing: ~25% lower than Office Workers

By focusing on the components that mattered most, the IT department has since been able to improve their remote workers’ DEX Score to 7.1!

How can we proactively prevent spikes in network traffic?

Tapping into Nexthink’s detailed network dashboards, IT was able to isolate several factors that were sapping the company’s traffic. Popular domains with high traffic consumption included customer sites—notice Netflix drew 314 GB! IT was able to intervene and advise employees to avoid their VPN when possible and refrain from using streaming services (like Netflix & Youtube) during work hours.

What can we do to improve our remote employees’ Wi-Fi performance?

IT was able to leverage Nexthink’s integrated Wi-Fi monitoring capabilities to determine if their employees’ computing issues resided with their routers or elsewhere. If a user experienced a poor Wi-Fi signal, IT was able to reach out proactively with instructions asking that person to move closer to the router. This capability helped IT and employees save valuable time trying to troubleshoot a deceptively simple fix!

How can IT prevent remote employee downtime from annoying password expirations?

Soon after shifting to remote work in the spring, employees submitted nearly 2k tickets looking for help with their password expirations. This inconvenience led to major downtime and productivity loss. To combat the problem, IT used Nexthink to identify and target relevant users with messages to reset their passwords just days before they were set to expire.

Nexthink Engage enables IT to cut through the noise and send targeted messages directly to employees.

Take hold of your work-from-anywhere (WFA) model

The examples above are just some of the ways your IT department can tackle tough questions with ease. If your IT team is eager to improve its WFA program, and they seek tangible, proactive solutions, then contact a Nexthink representative today.

Sandeep Prabhu, Senior Consultant

Zubin Sidhwa, Senior Partner Success Manager

The post End User Team Saves Big With Work Anywhere Strategy appeared first on Nexthink.

Pop quiz: An employee just submitted a ticket to IT about recurring application crashes. When IT finally gets back to them, what is the first thing they ask?

Answer: “When did you last update your device?”

If this rings true, there is a reason. Outdated devices and applications can quickly detract from digital employee experience and IT notoriously struggles to detect and resolve these issues at scale.

This is why when it comes to Digital Employee Experience management, proactivity is key.

Last week, we explored proactive employee self-help – empowering employees to resolve issues themselves through targeted engagement and automated remediation, at scale.

Now let’s explore one way IT can reduce incidents from occurring in the first place by ensuring that every device across their landscape stays current and compliant.

Addressing device vulnerability

An outdated or non-compliant device can open a flood gate of potential IT issues: poor performance, application instability, and security vulnerabilities—just to name a few. All severely impacting employees’ digital experiences.

This is a serious concern. Version dispersion issues are complex to detect—much less resolve—especially across a large device landscape. In most cases, support teams will only notice outdated devices and applications when an employee submits a ticket, ultimately forcing them to manually resolve these issues on a case-by-case basis, taking a significant toll on support teams’ productivity.

And in a world of SaaS and continuous update cycles, it is only getting worse.

Visibility. Action. Engagement.

We know a few things about device non-compliance: it causes a wave of performance issues; it’s hard to detect; and it can slow IT productivity. But what can you do to avoid devices from becoming increasingly vulnerable from non-compliance?

By keeping a constant eye on critical services versioning, deploying remote updates when necessary and keeping employees involved and aware. Our customers have proven this to be easier than you think by leveraging key Nexthink capabilities:

• Real-time, event-level visibility and analytics to monitor and detect outdated devices and application version dispersion
• Custom data retrieval and remote actions to diagnose root-causes and take instant action on employee devices at scale
• A hyper-targeted employee engagement channel to drive adoptions and awareness and enable self-help

These Nexthink capabilities enable IT teams to keep every device in their landscape up-to-date and compliant to significantly reduce ticket count, free-up IT productivity and improve Digital Employee Experience.

Below are some recent examples of how Nexthink customers achieved this.

1 – Reducing outdated Windows OS 

This UK mining company wanted to ensure that a critical Windows 10 feature update had been successfully deployed. They saw that over 6,000 devices had not rebooted in more than 30 days preventing them from receiving the update, potentially leading to performance degradation and security risks.

To remediate this issue, the IT team quickly identified affected devices. They deployed an automated self-help campaign to briefly describe the issue to the employee and offer to restart their device. If a user accepted, a remote action would trigger a forced restart in two minutes.

Within a week, the company noticed a 77% reduction in outdated devices due to an increase in reboots, preventing potential performance or security incidents from ever occurring. Since employees were directly involved and educated about the reason for this restart, the campaign response rates were much higher than usual.

Manually reaching out to convince an employee to restart their device used to take the support team about 10 minutes per user. This automation saved over 1,000 hours of productivity.

2 – Disabling fast-start on Windows devices

Windows 10’s Fast Startup feature has benefits for individual users, but this northern European manufacturing company diagnosed the feature as the source of performance issues on certain devices. If this were to escalate, it could be devastating. They also discovered that the feature could prevent them from correctly reporting the devices’ last reboot date and time.

To remediate the issue proactively, the IT team scripted and deployed two custom remote actions using Nexthink Act. They first retrieved and reported that out of 3,100 Windows devices, around 500 had Fast Startup enabled. The second remote action disabled Fast Startup on each of those devices.

In a single troubleshooting session, the company improved Fast Startup compliance by ~98%, saving them hundreds of hours of productivity. And that is before considering future incidents that will not need to be resolved – they will simply never occur!

3 – Improving VPN performance during flexible working

This French multinational in the transport sector needed to effectively and securely transition to 100% remote working conditions due to COVID-19. This resulted in every employee connecting to the VPN, unaware that the company only required corporate VPN for accessing specific intranet applications, but not for all general services such as Office 365.

The result?

The company’s VPN system collapsed entirely, preventing thousands of users from accessing critical internal applications.

Instead of scripting a remote action to enforce proper VPN usage, the IT team decided to take a softer approach using Nexthink Engage. They quickly deployed a targeted awareness campaign to educate employees about unnecessary VPN usage for corporate resources not within the LAN. The highly personalized campaign delivered the message in seven different languages and only targeted those users who connected through the VPN.

Thanks to the campaign’s contextual and timely aspects, positive outcomes were clear in just a few hours. Over 23,500 employees received the campaign with a 90% response rate. The VPN load was quickly reduced and overall VPN connectivity and performance increased, reducing network usage by 75%. Employees could access their critical services once again, saving thousands of hours of both IT and employee productivity, as well as avoiding any related operational costs.

4 – Improving SCCM agent compliance

This Dutch food distributor noticed that a high percentage of SCCM agent software was out of date across the network. This worried them as SCCM agent compliance was critical to their software distribution and patching.

To further investigate, the IT team scripted and deployed a remote action that reported every device where SCCM services had stopped. Their next move was to deploy a second automated remote action over a one-month period that restarted and restored each devices’ SCCM services.

By leveraging these simple remote actions, IT improved the SCCM compliance of over 14,000 devices by restarting SCCM services, delivering the required patching rates and avoiding future potential tickets. To apply the same fix manually at that scale would have taken upwards of 2,000 hours of IT support’s productivity.

Success stories at scale

The stories above are just some of the many customer success stories we encounter daily. I wish I could share them all with you. For instance, how a Danish cargo company updated Bit-locker to corporate standards across 98.5% of devices with a single remote action, how a healthcare organization enabled a Chrome auto-update of 7,2500 devices to prevent over 500 tickets, or how this security agency encrypted 15,000 devices in just three days.

We’ll continue to share some great stories, so keep an eye out!

Staying current for a better employee experience

Ensuring proper usage and versioning is critical to prevent device and infrastructure vulnerability. But it does not have to be a complex process. You can deploy custom remote action to retrieve data or remediate issues at scale using Nexthink Act, send out personalized targeted campaigns to keep employees informed of current issues using Nexthink Engage, or a combination of both using automated self-help.

The choice is yours. But Nexthink has the data to make sure you make the right one.

Book a demo to find out how you can proactively manage employee experience by ensuring your devices stay current and up-to-date using Act and Engage from Nexthink.

The post How to Keep Your Digital Devices Current & Compliant appeared first on Nexthink.

Personalization Comes of Age

The world of work is evolving. Rapidly.  Today’s employee believes in an omnipresent workplace, just like her everyday companions – Uber, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Personalized services and experiences are her new normal. Organizations are reimagining their workplaces to give employees the best personalized experience.  It’s the new gold to keep employees delighted.

Enter Workplace Personas.  While most organizations agree with the importance of personas, not many truly get it.

What are Workplace Personas?

No two employees are the same. Their workplace behaviours, preferences, perceptions, expectations, and job requirements differ. Each person’s workplace DNA is completely unique. It is therefore imperative to build experiences from the bottom up, starting with the individual employee.

In addition, employees’ preferences and job needs change over time. As her needs and motivations change, her behavior changes as well. It is not sufficient to define her persona based on superficial attributes which could lead to failure and negative business impact.  Indeed, persona management has been in vogue for a while.  But studies indicate that Workplace Persona projects often don’t succeed.

Why do Workplace Personas Fail?

Reason #1: Shallow Persona

A few years ago, Netflix uncovered some hard truths with their extensive Big Data analysis & A/B testing experiments. They deciphered conclusive evidence from the tons of user data collected over years. Todd Yellin, Netflix’s VP for Product Innovation, openly confided that demographic data (age and gender) was taking them nowhere in their quest to deliver personalized experiences. It was apparently what they do that mattered most!

As such, a 75-year-old woman may like “Breaking Bad”, a 17-year-old “Dance Moms”, and some stay-at-home moms may prefer “House of Cards” over “Chef’s Table”.

Likewise, workplace personas created in silos may not be realistic enough or deep enough to be meaningfully applied to workplace processes.

“

It's not who they are in a superficial sense – like gender, age, even geography. It's not even what they tell you. It's what they do.

Reason #2: Static Personas 

Employee personas can never be static. You cannot profile and map someone to his perfect persona and simply stop there. The moment he enters a new environment, his goals, activities and preferences change, as does his persona. Personas are as dynamic as the people they belong to.  IT needs to take a continuously evolving approach, rather than a set-It-and-forget-It one.

Reason #3: One-size-fits-all Approach

Demographic-based personas can turn quite monotonous. Employee personas should help tailor internal experiences for target user groups in your workspace. The one-size-fits-all approach is not going to make your persona implementation successful.

Managing Personas – The Nexthink way

At Nexthink, we take a logical and advanced approach to persona management. Nexthink Experience collects myriad data about employee experience and converts it into actionable insights in three smart steps.

Step 1: Collect Hard Data

This includes every artifact of the digital workplace – like the device, virtual platform, applications, network connections, etc. Nexthink collects these details natively as a part of the standard data collection process.

Step 2: Collect Sentiment Data

Next, we collect user sentiment data, overall as well as on specific issues.  This allows us to uncover hidden persona dimensions, and correlate sentiment with the hard data we are observing in the overall digital employee experience landscape.

Step 3: Creating Persona Dimensions 

Then we convert this raw data into more meaningful intelligence based on definitions, thresholds, scoring criteria, etc. based on your business goals.  Nexthink monitors and tracks these in real time; they are then recombined to generate persona traits, so you can examine the distribution of these personas in your overall end user landscape.  In other words, Nexthink decodes your workplace DNA!

Evolving Personas, Evolving Workplaces

To offer the best Digital Employee Experience, your IT environment needs to adapt to employees’ changing personas.

Nexthink is built on the belief that an evolving persona dictates how the digital workplace should evolve. And when IT can proactively respond to that change, the result is a delightful employee experience.

Last Mile Challenge of the Modern Workplace – Solved!

As studies show, the last mile of the entire supply-chain adds up to about 30% of the cost!  Likewise, digital experience is the last mile challenge in a modern workplace. Get your employee persona right, and you’ll set yourself up for success.

The post Workplace DNA. Decoded! appeared first on Nexthink.

This byline first appeared in Open Access Government. 

Matt Hall, Assistant Director of IT at Bournemouth University, explores the challenges that university IT teams are facing as they support an increase in remote learning.

Higher education is one of the many sectors facing the prospect of profound reorientation in the post-COVID-19 world. Following the government’s re-evaluation of approach, which saw students awarded predicted grades at A-level, many university leaders are concerned that taking on the extra, successful students would mean a stretch to resources – especially with social distancing and remote learning requirements needed to manage the spread of the virus.

At Bournemouth University we’ve always placed a significant emphasis on the campus premium experience we offer to students, appreciative of the significant cultural, social, and educational benefits that derive from a lively campus community.

And despite the pressure on the higher education sector, we hope to be able to continue to offer all of these benefits to students in the years to come. But 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.

University IT teams

This is only going to work properly with the proactive involvement of university IT teams, who will by and large have to transition from providing a very focused, on-premise service, to something far more fluid.

Most campus IT teams will have enjoyed a baptism of fire to this “new normal” at the outset of lockdown. One thing we’re grateful for at Bournemouth University was that we were already talking to Nexthink about plans to provide a better experience to our users, and quickly accelerated the engagement in order to enable and manage an overnight shift to a remote work environment.

The first thing we had to do was accelerate our staff’s already ongoing transition from PCs to laptops. The new digital experience software enabled us to instigate greater investigative access to these new devices, by giving us full visibility of end-user experience across our entire estate.

Internet connectivity

A main challenge around this concerned internet connectivity. On-site it was a controlled environment, and suddenly there was this new piece of infrastructure between IT and our users – knowing what the weak link might be was vital when it came to diagnosing issues impeding productivity; there’s no point investigating issues on a laptop, for instance, when the cause is an internet connectivity problem.

When a user called with an issue, we were also now able to find their device and see a graphical timeline of their issues. This helped us get to the bottom of any number of crashes, high CPU usage issues, disk space problems, and connectivity difficulties.

Dynamic network mapping within the Nexthink Experience platform makes it easy for IT to quickly assess their infrastructure and intervene at the right moment.

Another useful benefit came from a single view of all our machines, and a score designating their performance. This allowed us to be proactive, solving problems before they impacted users, or before they needed to notify us of them.

Using these tools allowed us to make steep changes pretty much overnight in our support capability. I can’t quite imagine what it would have been like if we hadn’t implemented it as quickly as we did. We would’ve managed, I’m sure, but we wouldn’t have been able to respond as quickly and with as high a quality of service.

Blended learning experience

How teaching will be provided in the future will change over time. For next year, however, we’re anticipating and preparing for a more blended learning experience for students. Our increased capacity to better measure and facilitate employee engagement and wellness is going to be a big part of that.

We’ve certainly noticed that our services have come to the fore in 2020: our response to the crisis has really established a much greater partnership between IT and the university’s broader strategy. IT already underpinned most modern organizations of course, and universities were no different. 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.

Matt Hall, Assistant Director of IT, Bournemouth University

If your IT department is eager to improve their remote work or learning setup, 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 Proactive IT & The Future of Higher Education appeared first on Nexthink.

Whenever a file transfer, instant messaging, email, or Wi-Fi failed in the office, an employee could stand up and walk over to deliver the message in person. It certainly didn’t grind their workday to a halt. But as organizations have grown globally, so has their reliance on digital collaboration—the critical tools and services that enable employees to remain productive when working together.

And with remote working becoming a not-so-temporary reality, the ability to collaborate digitally across the workplace has changed from an important-to-have to a must-have when shaping the Digital Employee Experience.

Getting your digital collaboration services up and running is only half the battle.  Employees also need to adopt and use them properly to optimize collaboration and prevent unnecessary tickets.

In this blog series, we’ve discussed the game-changing benefits of automated self-help and how to keep your devices compliant using smart engagement and automation. In this post, I’ll cover examples of how organizations can proactively detect and address collaboration issues using similar methods to avoid disruptions in a distributed workforce.

Addressing collaboration with engagement and automation

The first step is to proactively detect issues using a comprehensive scoring system and detailed drill-down capabilities. That is, tracking the source of performance or experience degradations before they can impact employees at scale. IT teams can then quickly decide on the most impactful course of action—engagement, automated fixes, or a combination of both.

As always, Nexthink relies on three key capabilities to do this:

• Detailed analytics to quickly pinpoint the root cause of productivity and collaboration degradation
• Targeted engagement to reach out and drive adoption or deploy self-help capabilities
• Automated remote actions to remediate issues at scale on any impacted device population

Combining these capabilities has provided Nexthink customers with the abilities to address any identified collaboration issues in the best possible way while always keeping the employee in mind. This ensures that every employee can effectively collaborate and improve their overall digital experience when working remotely.

Let’s take a quick look at some recent examples.

Improve MS Teams presence on 1,000 devices using smart engagement

A northern European manufacturing company deployed an initial roll-out of MS Teams using Microsoft SCCM to retire Skype for Business. Post-migration, they quickly identified that over 2,000 devices still did not have MS Teams installed. With every employee working remotely, the company deemed this a critical issue that needed immediate attention as it could seriously impact productivity.

With SCCM failing to update this device population and IT running out of time, the Head of End-User Computing decided to take a different approach. They sent out an immediate Engage campaign to every user without Teams installed on their device and offered clear instructions on how to install it themselves.

The results were immediate. In 48 hours, they received an 80% response rate with over 1,200 devices successfully installing teams using the instructions provided. This allowed IT to avoid hundreds of installation tickets, which can take upwards of 15 minutes per device to resolve manually. It saved them thousands of potential support-hours and ensured that every employee could collaborate effectively, with minimal downtime, on the same platform.

Proactive MS Teams training

Once successfully migrated, the same manufacturing company noticed a small rise in Service Desk tickets related to their new collaboration tool—MS Teams. Three recurring complaints were apparent: location of features,  scheduling, and meeting management. IT quickly noticed there was no technical issue here—the problem was from poor adoption and service usage.

To remedy, they identified the need to deploy an educational campaign to train employees about proper Teams usage to drive adoption, reduce ticket count and improve the collaboration experience. The team created an Engage campaign targeting new MS Teams users to help with the top three Teams issues identified.

Overall, they deployed three adoption campaigns to train users on how to join a meeting, schedule a meeting and use chat features, each receiving 71%, 69% and 79% successful response rates, respectively. In total, hundreds of employees accessed the proper training with minimal effort. Although this was not a technical fix, IT significantly reduced ticket count related to incorrect usage and, in the process, improve employee’s digital collaboration experience.

Enabling Skype for Business Outlook plug-in on 95% of devices

This US financial company received a ticket about an employee missing the Skype-for-business plug-in for Outlook. A quick search showed that this user was not alone—hundreds of other devices were also missing the plug-in. They simply never raised it with IT.

Using self-help automation, The IT team was able to resolve the issue quickly. IT sent a custom Engage campaign to every device missing the plug-in and asked the user if they’d like to enable it. By clicking OK, a remote action would execute the add-in installation on the device.

In a single week, 95% of devices had Skype for Business plug-in enabled. A month later, the IT team noticed a 28% reduction in Skype for Business related tickets and a 12% reduction in Outlook related tickets. This not only saved precious productivity hours for the support team, but also undoubtedly improved the overall collaboration experience.

Improving Outlook performance with automation

Last year, this Dutch financial company discovered several outdated Outlook binaries leading to performance issues and, in turn, application crashes. While some employees had raised tickets, the IT team quickly discovered that hundreds more were experiencing the same frustration but remained silent about it. Outlook is one of the key productivity and collaboration tools for the firm. The IT teams quickly deployed an automated remote action across the workplace to immediately update every device with the problematic binaries.

After a couple of days, they noticed a 93% reduction in Outlook crashes. What’s more, the support team has kept this remote action updated and available to consistently fix similar Outlook crashes. Since mid-2019, the company has not experienced any significant uptick in Outlook crashes by having this automation at hand.

Troubleshooting Wi-Fi signal

After a complete move to remote working in early March, a global car manufacturing company detected that over 3,000 employees (15% of their remote workforce) experienced poor audio/video quality with their main collaboration tool, creating a significant drop to their Digital Employee Experience Score. A quick look at Nexthink’s level 1 dashboard showed that employees with poor audio/video call quality had a poor Wi-Fi signal or health.

The IT team could not magically fix employees’ routers or ISP contracts. What they could do, however, was educate them on proper at-home Wi-Fi usage. The IT team sent out an Engage campaign targeting all affected users with clear on-screen messages asking users to move closer to their router or how to switch to a stronger band on their router.

A week later, just about all of the 3,000 employees had improved their Wi-Fi-Strength, their Teams and Skype performance, which positively impacted the overall Digital Experience Score as well.

Read the full story here.

Collaboration is a crucial driver of digital employee experience, especially during these times of remote working. Faced with constant new technologies, unceasing software updates and rising employee expectations, IT teams need to ensure they can consistently deliver a great digital collaboration experience.

Targeted engagement allows IT to drive proper usage and adoption of new collaboration tools, while automation offers instant diagnosis and remediation of technical issues. And, of course, the combination of both enables automated self-help opportunities for true proactive collaboration management.

Ultimately, this not only reduces IT ticket count and optimizes support productivity, but also ensures employees can confidently and effectively collaborate with their colleagues regardless of their location and improve their overall digital experiences.

Read more about Engagement and Automation success stories in previous blog posts:

• How IT & Employees Can Work Better Together
• How to Keep Your Digital Devices Current

Schedule a Demo to discover how you can ensure and great collaboration experience across your own workforce.

The post How IT Can Enable Smooth Digital Collaboration | Engagement and Automation appeared first on Nexthink.

Our customers often stress the phenomenal power that comes from the integration of Nexthink and ServiceNow. Bernardo Ramos, for example, former Director of IT for Arkema, saw their integration as a way of getting real-time information on all their workstations automatically and without effort.

“With ServiceNow I had the feeling of having something the best of its class,” he told us, shortly before his retirement earlier this year. “With Nexthink I have the feeling of something that is unique in its class. Working with these two tools has been a passion.”  

The unprecedented subsequent events of 2020 have made the enhancements that Nexthink and ServiceNow (respectively and together) deliver to users more important than ever. Following a special co-presented BrightTalk presentation, ‘Reimagined Service Management: Revolutionizing Digital Employee Experience,’ Nexthink caught up with Paul Hardy (Evangelist, Chief Innovation Office at ServiceNow) to discuss the significance of these changes. 

Nexthink: What service desk trends have been brought to the forefront through the 2020 crisis? 

Paul Hardy: I think we’ve seen the greater narrowing of the gap between treating users like employees and treating them like customers. And with that, we’ve seen the service desk essentially become a customer service desk and the customer desk an experience desk. Talking to customers about some of the challenges they’ve faced with having thousands of staff working from home, we’ve consistently heard that the calls that traditionally came into the service desk weren’t always just IT related.  

Often in organizations the only service desk they had for employees was the IT service desk, so naturally a lot of the work that the service desk started doing or had to do was actually cross functional or cross departmental. Which means of course that they’ve got to be much more diverse with the knowledge they’ve got, and to really learn to treat their customers – the employees – with the white glove service when required.  

How were you able to support service desks through this period? 

Central to this was our ability to automate all of those mundane administrative tasks that the service desk was previously consumed with. That enabled service desks to concentrate on the work that only humans can do – the empathy part. Ultimately, we want to know that employees are happy all the time because happy staff are more productive and greater productivity leads to greater profitability.  

Expectations have grown and I think it’s no longer those traditional KPIs that we’re looking at. It’s really looking at how we expect the services to run. And if we look at the consumer world, with the likes of Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon, we start to see how expectations are being molded for the workplace. And now more recently we’ve seen it change again with people working from home, working from anywhere, on any device at any time.  

Ultimately, companies want to avoid embedding so many policies or processes that they effectively stifle business innovation. What you actually want to do is allow people to be creative, allow people to be innovative, to protect the perimeter and allow people to drive forward. So, service management priorities and capabilities are hugely important – but they’re there to guide innovation, they’re there to guide the way forward, rather than create hurdles that get in the way.  

How does IT need to structurally adapt to and anticipate its changing role? 

I think fundamentally this requires a cultural shift, and we’ve got to also think about constantly measuring satisfaction and outcomes. All the SLAs we had in the past should have been agreed upon with the business. But nine times out of ten they couldn’t agree with an SLA because they couldn’t understand the thousands of acronyms that IT used.  

Then there’s the assumption at organizations with conventional SLAs: that we’ve hit our SLAs so we’re all good. It’s like that watermelon example: green on the outside but red on the inside – and that’s the customers that aren’t happy. We’re moving more towards this agile approach which is constant and in real time. Why should we only ask people when they’ve resolved a ticket if they’re happy or not? Why don’t we ask them all the time, to have a constant dialogue? 

You can watch Paul Hardy and David D’Agostino (ITSM Practice Lead, Nexthink) on a special BrightTalk presentation, Reimagined Service Management: Revolutionizing Digital Employee Experience. 

If your IT department is eager to improve their remote work or work-from-anywhere setup, 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 Paul Hardy (ServiceNow): The Changing Role of IT appeared first on Nexthink.

This byline first appeared in Computer Weekly.

The head of AXA IM’s proximity services discusses the importance of creating a digital experience during the lockdown in France.

I remember a discussion I had with a senior manager at AXA Investment Managers (AXA IM) right at the beginning of what in France has been termed the “confinement” – or “lockdown” in the UK.

“Do you realize,” he asked me, “that, right now, your team has the most responsibility in the company for our making it through this crisis? It’s not the asset managers or the traders – everything is in your hands. If you can’t guarantee a decent level of support for users, and fix all the issues in front of them, the company is really in trouble.”

It was quite a statement, but it was easy to see why it was true. Almost overnight, we had gone from being a ‘traditional business,” with HQs, offices, commutes, meeting rooms, and so on, to a highly dispersed one. In the Paris area alone, AXA IM had about 1,500 people working from home. That’s 1,500 independent offices for IT to worry about.

Our ultimate aim was to guarantee the experience of all those remote users – from the quality of internet access, to the reliability and speed of the applications they were using. As long as they were able to keep working and be productive, the company could continue to exist.

No substitute for experience

In new research from Vanson Bourne, senior IT leaders from the UK and US report that digital employee experience has become an essential or high priority to 79% today, compared with 49% 12 months ago.The significant uptick makes sense – the more dispersed, remote or flexible your workforce, the more obviously important users’ digital experience is to an organization’s productivity and bottom line. If you are outside the office, your entire professional experience is mediated through, and dependent upon, technology.Fortunately, we already had the right tools and approach in place to make this dramatic transition work.

Until a couple of years ago, IT support at AXA IM was quite reactive – when someone reported an issue, we had to simply respond as quickly and effectively as possible. What we have since implemented, though, was a digital experience management platform, Nexthink, which allowed us to be much more proactive – with dashboards providing key insights and notifications into our user estate, and the ability to anticipate and fix issues before they become a problem.

This investment and approach paid dividends when we found ourselves having to adapt to 100% remote working almost overnight in the early months of the year.

The requests and incidents for home workers have been totally different from those we would manage on-premise. The main challenge at the outset was to guarantee the quality of the LAN and the network – after that, to guarantee users’ experience. One priority here was to simplify the actions of users, and to promote tools such as Zoom, WebEx and Teams.

The proactive capability we had instituted enabled us to observe different behaviors and data from our machines, this time getting in front of remote workers’ issues. For instance, we observed that the shutdown buttons on our laptop estate were only triggering hibernation – so we quickly pushed a script to every laptop across the world to correct the issue, before the consequences of this could affect user experience.

Nexthink has enabled our IT teams to be more proactive. In fact, as a result of the monitoring platform, we have created a dedicated brand for proactive IT support within the company called Precogs. Now our IT teams are going to users to inform them of any application or latency issues and telling them how they plan to fix it. This saves staff time and improves their digital employee experience.

Within just a couple of months of the confinement, we could genuinely say that the company had not only continued to operate, but was functioning well. Employees were very happy with the quality of their experience, their workstation and their laptops, latency was low, and network and the internet access were very good.

We can say with confidence that remote working has been a great success – and our commitment to experience has been a big part of this.

This matters in the medium term as much as it does right now. The future of the workplace remains uncertain, and the capacity to support a more flexible workforce matters just as much going forward as it has supporting an exclusively remote one in the recent past.

We know we are ready to ensure employees have a great experience wherever they are working from.

Christophe Verducci is head of proximity services at AXA IM.

The post How AXA Investment Managers Supports User Experience appeared first on Nexthink.

This byline first appeared in vmblog.com

By Jelmer Berendsen (Enablement Lead, Digital Workplace, ABN AMRO) and Daan Tuijnman (Product Owner, Digital Workplace, ABN AMRO) 

For the digital workplace team at ABN AMRO, it wasn’t just the COVID-19 crisis itself that was unexpected. If you’d have told us in January 2020 that – within a few months – our tooling and capability would be the subject of direct and regular attention by the board at our company, we would have had trouble believing that, too.

ABN AMRO has long had quite a special focus on employee experience in general. Its philosophy is that a happy, productive workforce will inevitably improve customer experience, and works hard to create this. The outlook definitely extends to employees’ experience with technology (‘digital employee experience’) which our IT teams take extremely seriously.

To monitor and improve this overall experience and perception of IT among users, the digital workplace team doesn’t only leverage hard metrics, but perception data also. Before the COVID-19 crisis, we were using Nexthink Engage (a survey and communication product that allows IT to interact directly with users on their devices without email) to establish this in several areas.

It was this simple but effective approach that allowed us to develop a meaningful dialogue with the people that matter most to IT: the users.

Like so many IT teams worldwide, at the outset of quarantine, we had to transition overnight from partial remote working to working from home for our complete workforce.

Engage was an obviously useful tool in this scenario from an IT perspective: it enabled us to quickly and efficiently survey thousands of users on technical issues. However, it also quickly occurred to us that the same tool could also provide us with a fantastic way of reaching out directly to our colleagues at a time of great uncertainty and stress—to find out how they were doing emotionally as well as technologically.

Were they keeping fit and staying sane?

How was morale?

In short, what was their level of wellbeing?

All these surveys were getting great response rates—30%, 40% and even +50% (with approval rates in the 90% range). Suddenly we were working closely with HR on employee wellbeing. If on the one hand this was a surprising development (and it was) on the other hand it really made sense. When employees work from home, their ‘workplace’ is their tech, their laptop the intermediary between every single interaction with their colleagues, professional and personal.

It wasn’t just HR that was interested in our results, either. Our surveying was quickly receiving direct and regular attention from the board. Following the first wave, we were encouraged to implement ongoing regular surveys so as to be able to track general employee wellbeing over time.

It would be easy to see this high-level strategic engagement as a circumstantial one. Yet as in so many areas of technology, here the crisis has accelerated an existing trend, rather than just created one. In this specific instance, while remote work exacerbates the impact of IT of productivity and wellbeing, flexible work was already an established trend before COVID-19 accelerated its emergence. And in general, the more IT focuses on the experience of users, the more it will become a strategic partner to colleagues – all the way up to the board, where employee wellbeing and productivity is such an obvious focus.

While this is certainly a testament to the versatility of Nexthink’s tooling, it’s probably only fair to stress that they were able to help with a number of strictly IT challenges during this same period also, providing great visibility and proactive functionality across our dispersed user base. But this was an interesting glimpse into something many IT teams and vendors anticipate in the coming years: IT developing into a much closer strategic partner to the wider business, with a significant role to play both in ensuring employee productivity and wellbeing.

##

About the Authors

Jelmer Berendsen, Enablement Lead, Digital Workplace, ABN AMRO

 Jelmer Berendsen is a strong believer in the experience factor in IT. He has been at ABN AMRO for almost 4 years, seeking to harness the power of data in order to drive sound business decisions within the digital workplace.

Daan Tuijnman, Product Owner, Digital Workplace, ABN AMRO

Daan Tuijnman is tasked with enhancing ABN AMRO’s digital workplace through the transformation of data into actionable insights. He is driven by a constant ambition to improve processes and provide value to the broader business.

The post How COVID-19 Made IT Experience a Board Level Concern appeared first on Nexthink.

If you mentioned the word “Green IT” to tech support twenty years ago you probably would have been met with a blank stare.

Climate change always felt like a conversation for somebody else—not those in charge of resetting our passwords or installing Office.

But while innovations in cloud computing and business applications have helped IT cut infrastructure costs and remain competitive, that progress has come at an environmental cost. Advancements in software still require serious energy from hardware—and that’s where the IT industry has dropped the ball.

Cloud services require significant power from data centers, which currently generate 2% of all global electricity and will likely reach 8% by 2030. And sometimes just maintaining software can be unnecessarily wasteful—Bitcoin for example, takes more energy to maintain than the entire nation of Switzerland. By 2040, the IT hardware sector (PCs, laptops, monitors, smartphones and servers) will account for 14% of the world’s carbon footprint—up from 1.5% in 2007.

Yet thankfully, some IT Leaders are starting to recognize the role they play in all this and they’re trying to do something about it.

Comparing IT hardware waste to other energy consumers

Earlier this year, we looked at one customer’s work devices (laptops and desktops) over a six-week period and discovered they had consumed 3.84 billion kWh and released 1.53 billion kgs of CO2 emissions.

In less than two months, those devices released the same amount of CO2 emissions that 333,061 American cars would in a single calendar year!

By leveraging Nexthink’s experience dashboards and integration with PowerBI, our customer’s IT department was able to identify which regions consumed the most power and released the most CO2 emissions from their devices.

How did we arrive at this information?

First, some key terms:

Hardware Consumption = 3.84 billion kWh (Aug 3 – Sep 14)

By focusing on device Uptime as a starting point, IT was able to infer how much energy the company’s laptops and desktops consumed.

… and identify which regions were bigger energy consumers than others:

Comparing this information to the housing industry, we were able to infer that these devices consumed the same amount of power as approximately 349,066 American homes do in a single year (*the average annual consumption for a home in the U.S. is 10,972 kWh)!

Hardware Emissions = 1.53 billion kgs of CO2 emissions (Aug 3 – Sep 14)

With Nexthink’s device dashboards and integration into PowerBI, the IT team could trace their device emissions over time and drill down into specific regions and employee personas. Notice the big spike in emissions during the first few weeks of September—a likely result from many remote employees returning to work after vacation. 

We also compared the company’s hardware emissions to the vehicle industry to help the IT department contextualize their carbon footprint.

A typical American passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. This assumes the average gasoline vehicle on the road today has a fuel economy of about 22.0 miles per gallon and drives around 11,500 miles per year. We found that the company’s devices released the same amount of CO2 emissions (1.53 billion kgs) as approximately 333,061 American cars do in a single year!

How can IT reduce their carbon footprint? Smart Automations & Employee Feedback

Currently, this IT department is using Nexthink’s automations and onscreen employee communications to help cut unnecessary hardware waste. For example, many employees inadvertently leave their devices running overnight. IT uses Nexthink’s Engage capabilities to contact users directly and remind them to turn off their devices when they’re not being used.

Knowing that sometimes devices need to remain on for things like Windows updates and other software/configuration changes, Nexthink helps IT identify which devices can be automatically powered off or set to sleep mode.

How is this possible?

Our platform gives IT visibility into exactly which devices (remote or in-office) are current or outdated.

And with Nexthink’s library of built-in automations, IT can quickly power down any device (or set to sleep mode) without any disruption to employees.

Connecting the dots – IT’s impact on the Environment

We are now helping this IT department to set clear environmental targets and to understand how their efforts can reduce their carbon footprint.

The formula is quite simple:

if this customer can reduce its Uptime (hr) and reflect that change throughout the sum of its consumption and CO2 emissions…

They will be able to…

By thinking in comparative terms (i.e. hardware to vehicle emissions) like above, technology leaders can broaden their understanding of Green IT initiatives and better control their environmental impact.

IT’s work doesn’t end with employees anymore, much like it did twenty years ago. Now, tech teams have a chance to expand their role and provide smart solutions that will protect our environment.

Ron Werling, Service Delivery Manager, Nexthink

Ahmed Adham, Managed Services Consultant, Nexthink

The post Green IT Project Puts Environmental Cost in Perspective appeared first on Nexthink.

Monday, long regarded as the worst day of the week, made good on its reputation for several thousand Slack users a few weeks ago. What started as an initial server problem at Slack during the wee hours of October 5^th, devolved into a performance outage that impacted users for more than six hours.

As shared by Slack, the popular collaboration tool experienced latency in almost all aspects of its service which included “the sending and loading of messages in threads and channels, as well as searching, calling, and accessing administrative features.”

Though IT disruptions are common among popular work tools like Slack (remember the MS Teams outage way back in the early days of the pandemic?) that doesn’t make them any more tolerable for IT leaders and digital workers. It’s often after an outage is detected that many IT teams go down divergent paths.

While Slack’s support team worked feverishly in the background to resolve their internal issues, I’m certain two very different timelines emerged that day for the typical IT department versus a Nexthink-backed IT department.

Nexthink-backed IT teams were able to respond to the Slack outage with far fewer actions and zero disruption to employees. By noon that day, IT had successfully transitioned all end-users to another company-approved collaboration tool.

This is how a standard IT team experienced the Slack outage:

• 5:58 a.m. PDT
  Slack announces first signs of degraded API performance for users.
• 9:00 a.m. PDT
  Help Desk starts receiving tickets from employees referencing poor functionality with Slack.

Total ticket count=23.

• 9:30 a.m. PDT
  Help Desk sends email message to all employees urging them to switch to other company-approved collaboration tools until Slack service is fully restored.

Open rate for email: 7%

• 10:00 a.m. PDT
  Help Desk leaves voice recording for employees: if you are encountering issues with Slack, please switch to another company-approved collaboration tool until service is fully restored.

Total ticket count=112.

• 10:30 a.m. PDT
  Help Desk posts company-wide message on Yammer explaining the outage and once again, urging Slack users to switch to another tool.
• 11:00 a.m. PDT
  Help Desk starts receiving tickets from employees asking for training and guidance on how to use their new collaboration tools.

Total ticket count=157.

• 12:00 p.m. PDT

Help Desk agents start assigning themselves to upper management employees that have submitted tickets. Agents reach out via their company-approved messaging app and field any end-user questions.

• 2:30 p.m. PDT
  Help Desk sends email to employees with training documents and videos on how to use their company-approved tools.

Open rate for email: 14%

• 4:30 p.m. PDT
  Help Desk sends email survey to employees to discover if they’re encountering any issues with their business tools

Open rate for email: 6%

• 10:30 p.m. PDT
  Slack announces they’ve resolved the majority of issues that were impacting users.

And this is how a Nexthink-enabled IT department responded to the Slack outage:

• 5:58 a.m. PDT
  Slack announces first signs of degraded API performance for users.
• 8:30 a.m. PDT
  IT’s End-User Experience Team receives alert for a drop in their company’s Productivity & Collaboration Experience Score. The EU Team quickly drills down into Nexthink’s dashboards and identifies several employees that are encountering issues with Slack.

Total ticket count = 0.

• 8:35 a.m.
  EU Experience Team sets a Nexthink-automated onscreen message to send directly to Slack-enabled devices upon boot up. The message informs users about the Slack outage and instructs them to switch to another company-approved tool for the day. Users must engage with the message for it to disappear. A link to training documents and videos are included in the onscreen message, as is an option for users to schedule one-on-one help with IT.

Nexthink message engagement rate: 100%

Total ticket count = 0.

{include screen shot}

• 8:45 a.m. PDT
  EU Experience Team sets a Nexthink-automated message to send to all previous Slack users (in-office & remote) that are actively using their devices. Users will receive the message one hour after the first Nexthink message is shown. Those that still need help are reverted to Help Desk agents who are able to remote in and provide assistance.

Nexthink message engagement rate: 100%

Total ticket count = 0.

• 12:30 p.m. PDT
  EU Experience Team finds Productivity & Collaboration Experience Score has returned to previous level.

Team breaks for lunch.

Total ticket count = 0.

• 10:30 p.m. PDT
  Slack announces they’ve resolved the majority of issues that were impacting users.

How your IT team handles problems speaks volumes about your employee experience

Application performance issues are common in the world of remote work. But often, IT is defined by how quickly they respond to those issues and prevent a computing experience from going from bad to worse.

If your IT department is eager to improve its work anywhere setup, and they seek tangible, proactive solutions, then contact a Nexthink representative today.

Prefer to see the Nexthink Experience platform in action?

Book a demo

Tom Lauzon, Solution Consultant, Nexthink

The post Slack’s Latest Outage – How Did Your IT Team Respond? appeared first on Nexthink.

For companies of all sizes, the struggle to understand and improve digital employee experience (DEX) is nothing new. What is new, however, is the working landscape we’ve all been navigating since the pandemic—where remote work has become the norm, and where the employee experience has become almost exclusively digital.

As a result, businesses have implemented significant strategic changes over the past several months. Large companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Quora have led the charge by hiring new leadership roles exclusively focused on remote work. The number of remote jobs advertised has increased by 147% since the beginning of 2020.

Moreover, we’ve seen a massive uptick in remote solutions hitting the market, proof that remote work isn’t just a temporary “sign of the times”; rather, it’s a new industry entirely.

This recent surge in hiring and investing for remote work success is a promising development. It indicates that companies are prioritizing the tools and manpower necessary for positive customer experiences and employee experiences alike.

On the other hand, the increase in remote work investments only casts a spotlight on a common problem, one that has plagued businesses for years before COVID-19 forced them to go remote. Most businesses—even those that equip their employees with the best tools and the deepest resources—don’t know how to actually measure their employee experience.

Purchasing the best collaboration tools and hiring a Head of Remote Work is a good start, just like buying new tires for a run-down automobile is a good start—you might keep the car moving, but there are likely more complex, interior problems that need to be solved. 

If you want to sustainably improve employee experience, you must first be able to measure it. 

Most IT departments can’t adequately measure digital employee experience

Most business leaders are aware of the value of DEX measurement. When we recently polled technology executives in North America and EMEA, 96% of respondents agreed DEX is important. However, more than one-third of those same respondents admitted they rely on manual methods to measure DEX—and 46% don’t measure it at all!

IT teams fall short in this regard for a litany of reasons, but they typically boil down to two root problems:

• IT teams function with a reactive mindset and make improvements through trial-and-error.
• Their SLAs emphasize metrics that say little to nothing about actual employee experience.

To explain further, let’s put these problems in the context of the latest remote work-related trends:

Let’s say you’re a mid-sized company that just hired a Head of Remote Work, whose first order of business is to invest in new tools to boost remote productivity. A fancy new project management platform replaces the old one that constantly crashed and gave employees headaches. The IT team gets a more robust incident management platform that enables them to manage support tickets faster.

According to the classic IT benchmarks, these investments pay off, big time. Service availability goes up, target resolution time drops. What you don’t realize, however, is that these metrics have given you only a sliver of visibility into actual end user experience. Sure enough, you conduct an employee survey concerning service performance weeks later, and are stunned to see even more negative comments than existed prior to the new investments.    

New work environment.

New technology.

Same old problem.

Remote working elevates the need for DEX measurement

The events of 2020 have only exacerbated the pitfalls of reactive IT strategies. 

We saw a prime example just last month, when Slack suffered a widespread outage. Many IT teams hustled to send out instructions to employees via traditional communication channels like email or html-based surveys. What they encountered that day was a growing stack of support tickets. Productivity for many companies took a nosedive, and what might’ve been a minor inconvenience with everyone together in the office became an all-day disaster in a remote setting. 

After a full day of putting out fires, most IT teams were back to square one. They might have learned some hard lessons about how to handle such an outage, but they gained no valuable insight into their employee experience. All they can do now is wait until the next outage and hope to handle it better.

But DEX hinges on much more than how quickly an IT team can tackle performance issues like last month’s Slack outage. With all the added volatility that comes with remote work, IT teams must take a full-scale mindset shift, from reacting to problems to proactively measuring, identifying and solving issues before they impact employees.

Enter: DEX scoring. 

The time is now for IT teams to embrace DEX scoring       

DEX scoring helps IT teams gain visibility into employee experience through actionable, quantifiable data. It’s a process that favors experience-based metrics over the traditional service-related metrics that IT teams have relied on for years.

DEX scoring combines hard metrics and employee sentiment data to provide a comprehensive view of your employees’ digital experience. By analyzing end user data related to device performance, web browsing, business apps, and other key end user information, IT teams can move on from trial-and-error tactics and towards data-driven decision making.

IT professionals at large and small companies alike have reaped the long-term rewards of DEX scoring. Hear from one of them, Arnauld Pire, Senior Manager of IT, Service Delivery and Operations at Toyota Motor Europe:

“We want to know that we’re making real improvements—reducing the number of crashes, for example—and affecting a difference to the end user’s perceptions,” says Pire. “Benchmarking our users’ IT experience helps us better understand our position and measure our progress.”

Improve your digital employee experience in 2021 and beyond

2020 has been a year of uncertainty and adversity for all businesses, but also a year of innovation and change. We’ve seen remote work become a full-fledged industry, and we’ve seen companies rise to the challenge and invest money and manpower in the remote work experience.

This year has also served as a lesson in the value of measuring employee experience. With employees dispersed across hundreds or even thousands of home offices, investing in new tools and management strategies will only get you so far. 

To truly invest in your employees, invest in measuring their digital experience. Even if your remote work environment is temporary, the benefits of DEX scoring will be permanent.

If your IT department is eager to improve its work anywhere setup, 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 Measuring Employee Experience in the Remote Work Era appeared first on Nexthink.

David Paul is the Director of the IT Service Desk at TRC Companies, Inc.—a leading consulting, engineering, and construction management firm that provides technology-enabled solutions to the power, oil & gas, and environmental & infrastructure markets.

David has over 25 years of IT service delivery and infrastructure experience, and he was one of the key figures to lead his company’s shift to remote work during the pandemic. He attended Nexthink’s previous two in-person Experience events in New York City, and we’re delighted to have him join us this year as a panelist at our virtual conference, Experience Everywhere.

We had the chance to catch up with David to learn how his team handled the pandemic, what he’s looking for at the conference, and where he thinks the digital workplace is heading.

Nexthink: in 3 words, how would you define 2020 from a career perspective?

Well, first I’d have to pick words that would be professional (laughs).

But jokes aside, I’d define 2020 as:

• Challenging
• Progressive
• Fulfilling

What’s the biggest professional lesson you learnt across 2020?

I always say to my team “The company isn’t there for IT. IT is there for the company.”

Looking back, I think the lessons we’ve all learned is that it’s important that IT Leaders have confidence in what they’re doing. But confidence will only take you so far, so you also need to deliver on real action plans that can be implemented quickly.

Also—and this is still a relatively new concept for many in IT—it’s critical to concentrate on customer service. In many cases, the only interaction remote employees might get is with their IT department! These were vital lessons that 2020 reinforced for me and my team.

Ok, Experience Everywhere. Tell us about your session?

I’ll be speaking on a panel w/ Henry Jennings (Principal Engineer-Clients Services/Desktop, Sony Pictures Entertainment) & Tori Paulman (Director of IT Client Services, Pegasystems).

I’m already learning a lot from both Henry and Tori, but for my part I will share some of the challenges my team and I faced this year and how we managed to overcome them. In particular, when the pandemic hit, we were smack in the middle of piloting Skype to Teams, but then, practically overnight, we had to move 5,000 employees immediately to Teams. We also had a VPN setup from before, but it wasn’t ready to support 4,000 users all at once! We went through a learning curve early on but came out better for it.

I’m also going to highlight the intuitive ways Nexthink helped us side-step these issues. The Engage feature, for example, was key at helping us collect unique survey data from our remote employees. One campaign in particular received a 98% response rate!

I also want to share a few points about the visibility we received from the platform. Nexthink gives us insights that maybe only one or two colleagues in your typical IT department might be able to find, but the other 99% of us really don’t have the technical skills, or time frankly, to retrieve that type of information. Nexthink fills that void, and the platform has equipped us with the context we need to quickly troubleshoot.

Do any particular stories come to mind?

Many, but here’s one: recently one of our employees called into the help desk citing some performance problem with his laptop. Before diving into his applications and network connection, we were able to immediately see that he hadn’t rebooted his device in quite some time. The reboot fixed his issue, but that type of visibility—all in one spot—is what I’m talking about!

Why did you agree to present at Experience Everywhere?

The short answer?

I really believe in this product. I’ve been a proponent since I first saw the platform in action at a ServiceNow event four years ago. It was the first product I had seen that offers up a noticeable shift in the way IT operates. You have brought it together, and the whole company seems geared exactly towards where the future of IT support and employee experience is headed. 

What else are you hoping to hear more about at the event?

I think we’re all facing similar challenges, regardless of our backgrounds or industry. I’m curious to see how other people are responding to tricky business problems.

And I’m also looking forward to hearing more from Nexthink in terms of product expansions and plans for 2021.

What are some of the best things about a digital (rather than in-person) conference?

Well for one, my feet don’t hurt at the end of the day!

It’s great to not have get on a plane and be away from family. But I will miss the after-event interactions, going out for dinner, etc. that gets lost but it’s great to connect too from the comfort of my own home.

Finally, where do you think the digital workplace is headed in 2021?

Pending vaccines and all of those logistics, I don’t think we’ll ever swing all the way back to how it was before the pandemic. I think many in IT, myself included, will continue to take a hard look at costs, and determine the best balance for IT and employees.

We used to think work was about an office with maybe remote as an option. Moving forward, it will probably be remote work, with an office as an extra option. It’s all about finding balance between that push and pull of onsite and remote work, and delivering the best IT experience possible.

Experience Everywhere is happening on December 9th (EMEA) and 10th (Americas).

Reserve your virtual seat today!

The post TRC’s IT Director Shares Timely Advice for Execs Facing Remote IT Issues appeared first on Nexthink.

Henry Jennings is the Principal Engineer-Clients Services/Desktop at Sony Pictures Entertainment. An industry veteran, Henry has worked with IT teams for over two decades on improving their services support and building tangible metrics for business success. He was fundamental in his company’s shift to remote work in 2020 and has managed several large-scale IT projects across Sony.

We’re delighted that Henry will join us this year as a panelist at our virtual conference, Experience Everywhere. We had the chance to catch up with Henry this week and he shared some advice that can help any IT leader approach the new year with a fresh set of eyes.

Nexthink: how would you define 2020 from a career perspective?

Looking back, I think 2020 was a good test of our resilience. For a lot of the IT staff, this was our opportunity to rise up to the challenge and I think we did that.

What’s the biggest professional lesson you learnt across 2020?

Letting go of old stigmas and taboos around modern work. I think there was always a fear that if people switched to remote work they would goof off and be less productive. We found the opposite to be true this year. Our employees are way more productive.

In addition, a lot of our technical fixes, like upgrading somebody’s RAM used to be done in person. There was a bit of a learning curve, but our IT teams have adopted workflows to implement hardware fixes from a virtual presence when necessary and other repairs virtually. Also, the Wi-Fi integration with Nexthink really helped us troubleshoot our remote workers’ problems.

Ok, Experience Everywhere. Tell us about your session?

I’ll be speaking on a panel w/ David Paul (Director of the IT Service Desk at TRC Companies) & Tori Paulman (Director of IT Client Services, Pegasystems). In particular, I’m going to share the philosophy I use with my team, which is this: how can we get just one-step better in everything we do?

I think too many times in IT people try to “boil the ocean,” they try to do too many things and never get very far. Instead, my team and I have tried to do things like cut a 15-minute call into the IT help desk down to 2 minutes; or remove manual work steps in the IT process so it’s automated (or done in a single click).

Those little wins are huge for IT departments, so I’m looking forward to sharing these stories. We’re targeting more integration work with ServiceNow and continuing to improve our services with employees.

Why did you agree to present at Experience Everywhere?

Honestly, it came down to scheduling. Being able to do this virtually was a huge help. Not having to worry about budgeting, travel, etc. made this very easy.

What else are you hoping to hear more about at the event?

I’m always looking for new perspectives, ideas, and technologies that can help my team improve. I’m hoping to learn other methodologies from my peers. For example, switching from SLAs to XLAs is something that we have taken (from outside Sony) and merged with our existing strategies.

What are some of the best things about a digital (rather than in-person) conference?

A virtual conference helps because you can be prepared, you can control your environment better than during an in-person event. It’s much more convenient but of course, you miss some things like that human connection and any post-event collaboration.

Finally, where do you think the digital workplace is headed in 2021?

I think there will be a balance between work-from-home and in-office. And I think there will be new productivity metrics that will come about. IT can help demonstrate whether people are more productive and healthier or not in a remote versus an in-office setup (overall, my bet is the former will win out).

From an IT perspective, I think this means we will have to build frameworks with ISPs to see their operations and keep our businesses going. I think we’ll need better collaboration with them so we can repair issues faster and escalate problems quickly as they unfold.

Experience Everywhere is happening on December 9th (EMEA) and 10th (Americas).

Reserve your virtual seat today!

The post Sony’s Top IT Leader Shares Key Employee Experience Tips appeared first on Nexthink.

Tori Paulman is Director of IT Client Services at Pegasystems—a leader in cloud software for digital transformation. Tori brings a unique background in human-focused IT services and has held a variety of leadership roles at major enterprises. In particular, her work focuses on delivering high quality end user interactions, implementing new technology services, production acceptance, and change management.

Tori will be speaking at Experience Everywhere and sharing her tips for delivering quality IT services to remote employees. We had the chance to catch up with Tori this week and ask her some questions about the past year and what she thinks is coming in 2021.

How would you define 2020 professionally in 5 words?

• Resilience
• Opportunity
• Solidarity
• Adaptable
• Solitude

What’s the biggest professional lesson you learnt across 2020?

That I never want to hear the word “unprecedented” again (laughs).

When the pandemic impacted my workplace in March, I thought it would be over in a few weeks. As the weeks wore on, people leaned on the word “unprecedented” to soften the blow of not yet being “perfect” at running a workplace turned inside out overnight. It occurred to me over time that the deeper lesson here is one I learned in Tai Chi: whatever is flexible will tend to grow, whatever is rigid will wither and die.

The minute I stopped hiding behind the word “unprecedented,” I unlocked a curiosity for whatever would come next.

What are some of the best things about a digital (rather than an in-person) conference?

I get to wear my slippers. In all seriousness though, the digital conference scene in 2020 has made a huge difference in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

More people than ever before, especially underrepresented communities (BIPOC, LGBTQ+, Womxn) have been able to benefit from thought-leadership and networking opportunities at modest price points and without needing to compete for precious T&E budgets. And, while my slippers don’t take the #1 spot, they sure make the top 3!

Finally, where do you think the digital workplace is headed in 2021?

I think IT will continue to take a more humanistic approach in the future. Humanistic IT means that tech projects don’t just focus on user experience, they delve into the human experience too.

I think as more leadership roles in IT shift to younger generations, we’ll see the industry take on more human-centered IT projects, projects that will take from psychology and blend into other departments like HR and internal communications. IT technicians will have to learn how to become consultants, to help coach their employees into picking and using the right work applications that meet their needs.

I think for many companies, the traditional IT “service desk” will soon change to the IT “experience desk.”

Experience Everywhere is happening on December 9th (EMEA) and 10th (Americas).

Reserve your virtual seat today!

The post Pegasystems Tech Expert Shares Humanistic IT Approach appeared first on Nexthink.

Nexthink Experience 2020.5, the latest product release, introduced a wide range of exciting new features for our customers—from additional Nexthink Act capabilities to Experience Optimization UX improvement. You can find out more on our product documentation page.

But one feature we’re thrilled about and just can’t wait for our customers to discover is the new Nexthink Engage User Interface.

Nexthink Engage has always been a core aspect of both the Nexthink product and the Nexthink philosophy of employee-centric IT. For years, its two-way hyper-targeted engagement channel has bridged the gap between millions of employees and their IT teams, by enabling IT to:

• gather key sentiment data in context to correlate with technical metrics,
• deploy timely communication campaigns to drive awareness and adoption or
• deliver automated self-help campaigns and remediation guidance to reduce tickets and improve employee experience.

Its flexible, real-time and targeted nature has continued to deliver unbeatable response rates by sending the right campaign, to the right people, at the right time on both macOS and Windows devices.

And it just got a new, fresh design update.

A modern, new look

The most evident change of this Engage upgrade lies in its new visual identity. The Nexthink UX team has been hard at work to find the right visual language that would keep Engage’s non-intrusive and user-friendly characteristics, wrapped in a new, modern and sleek look and feel.

Branding is a key aspect of internal communications, and customers can still change their Engage persona at will to create a stronger sense of familiarity and increase response rates. This release also allows customers to enhance their corporate branding with a new web-based branding interface. In a couple of clicks, customers can now change their logo or accent color to define their preferred engagement identity.

Efficiency in mind

But it’s not just a pretty UX. A lot of thought was put it the practicality and efficiency of this redesign. First, significant user research was conducted to develop the new visual identity and personalized branding with the simple objective of improving response rate and response times. In addition, a subtle streamlining of the campaign interaction flow further optimizes employee responses.

As always, Engage’s hypertargeting capabilities combined with these new UI/X changes will continue to deliver unparalleled response rates.

Adoption and Backwards Compatibility

As with any changes to the digital workplace, adoption is key. Without proper awareness and communication, sudden changes to the Engage interface might raise employee concerns. So, with the V6.29 | 2020.5 release, we’ve made sure to include the option for customers to decide when they want to use the new UI for each campaign. That way, customers can deploy their new UI environment at their own pace to ensure a smooth transition.

In addition, customers don’t have to worry about if their current custom campaigns will function with the new update. They can rest assured that all Engage campaigns will be fully backward compatible and will continue to work on either UI.

Watch this space

As with all things Nexthink, this is just another step in our journey to provide IT teams with the best digital employee experience management solution. Nexthink Engage, along with all Nexthink products, will continue to evolve and improve thanks to constant innovation and customer feedback.

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To find out more about the latest release V6.29 | Nexthink Experience 2020.5, visit the product documentation page.

For more on Nexthink Engage, check out:

• Nexthink Engage webpage
• Customer stories blog: employee self-help
• Watch thr Nexthink 101 webinar

If you want to see Nexthink working in your own environment, don’t hesitate to schedule a demo

The post Nexthink Engage: a new look & feel appeared first on Nexthink.

Since its initial release back in early 2020, Experience Optimization has offered IT teams around the world a prioritized guided process for proactively managing digital employee experience (DEX) across the enterprise. Since then, it has received continuous upgrades with each product release – new DEX Score dashboards, a modernized interface, additional playbooks, updated metrics or remote working categorization to name a few.

But it doesn’t stop there as Nexthink Experience’s 2020.5 release stays true to the continuous improvement of IT’s most important DEX management dashboard.

Here’s a quick overview of what to expect in the latest release.

Guided remediation UX improvements

The first—and most visual—change is the refreshed Playbook user experience.

Playbooks are automated suggestions available directly from the dashboard. Each one includes best practices gathered from a community of over 1,000 enterprise customers—covering investigation steps, automated actions, and employee engagement campaigns. These are based on defined filters, ranked by their impact on employee experience.

This new UX streamlines and facilitates playbook navigation in two simple columns. CauseDetect—Nexthink integrated AI-driven root-cause analysis—is easily accessible from this new navigation to quickly identify the underlying source of a chosen issue.

Filtering by virtualization

Experience Optimization provides dynamic filtering capabilities that automatically update dashboard metrics and suggested playbooks. Filters can be defined based on DEX score, employee experience, location, working style and more.

Managing virtualized management is a key aspect of Nexthink Experience, especially with the recent additional support for VMWare Horizons and Microsoft WVD. Users can now apply a “virtualization type” filter to focus on non-virtualized, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) or Session-Based Computing (SBC) users. This allows IT teams to use Experience Optimization’s proactive remediation capabilities specifically on its virtualized user base to manage and improve their experience.

Subscore trends and metrics

Scrolling down the Experience Optimization dashboard, users can find additional details highlighting key contributors to their DEX scores. With the latest release, dynamic “popover” windows provide deeper insight about the composition of each individual score with their own trend analysis and root-cause overview, from which you can drill down for further investigation.

Root cause analysis and DEX score context can now be understood at a glance to help drive faster and more efficient investigations.

Smarter filtering and additional playbooks

In addition to the above, the release introduces smaller features and updates. For example, smarter cross-dashboard filtering allows users to keep relevant filters while moving from one dashboard to another. More playbooks, including sentiment-related playbooks, have also been added, and many of the current ones have been updated with new remote actions, campaigns and investigations.

Experience Optimization

Experience Optimization streamlines every stage of the DEX management process, enabling IT teams to focus on the right issues, prioritize the right actions to take and remediate problems quickly and effectively. Its 360-degree DEX visibility, step-by-step remediation guidance and AI-driven insights provide IT with the means to be truly proactive.

Like all things Nexthink, Experience Optimization is under constant improvement based on innovation and customer feedback.

Visit the webpage for more details on Nexthink Experience Optimization.

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For a full description of the V6.29 / 2020.5 release, visit the product documentation

To explore how you can optimize your remote workforce’s home network, schedule a quick demo

The post Experience Optimization – Virtualization, UX and Insight Upgrades in Latest Release appeared first on Nexthink.

Khurem Goheer’s forward-thinking approach to empowering employees through technology signifies the rapid shifts enterprises are seeking across the globe to remain competitive through a period of unprecedented change. At Experience Everywhere EMEA December 9th, he will present a keynote on ‘The Data-Driven Digital Workplace’ – sharing exclusive insights into the transformational strategy his team drive to modernize and tailor employee technology at scale.  

Here, Goheer introduces himself, his mission, and his keynote at this month’s event. 

Nexthink: What’s the biggest professional lesson you learnt across 2020?  

Khurem Goheer: Organizations are faced with uncertain and unprecedented times. In the financial industry there is a recognition that customers no longer want the typical monolith services: they want to pick and choose componentized elements of the model.  

These factors are driving significant change pressure for many companies and industries. Therefore your organization must identify the opportunities to diversify and embrace the enablers that will ensure you can not only survive, but thrive…  

The customer landscape is shifting – and the customer must be at the heart of everything we do. It’s about focusing on and being ‘customer obsessed’.  

OK, Experience Everywhere. Tell us about your session?  

According to the Harvard Business Review, engaged employees leads to happy customers, which in turn drives revenue. Organization and industries that are able to drive the best employee experience can better remain relevant, successful, and competitive.

I will be sharing insights and experiences that in my humble opinion are critical to a data–driven digital workplace – basically a view on how to make data talk. My session is about how IT can more precisely focus on employees, providing them the best user experience and productivity tools to do their jobs – as individuals.  

What else are you hoping to hear more about at the event?  

Data is foundational in our industry today. Leaders must drive quality, consistency, availability and accessibility on-demand, and pave the way for the use of innovative technologies such as machine learning, augmented analytics and artificial intelligence. I’m looking forward to hearing more about these topics and more.

Where does the digital workplace go next in 2021?  

Given our mission, which is all about improving end-user experience and giving users the best possible set of services, it’s imperative that we can better understand our users.  I think one of the things a lot of organizations have to recognize is that the line of sight between technology and the business remains limited.

We decided that for us to get this right we had to be able to understand how our users consumed services in their various different styles: first we map user requirements and then we enable technology.  I think it’s an approach other organizations will follow next year. 

Experience Everywhere is happening on December 9th (EMEA) and 10th (Americas).

Reserve your virtual seat today!

The post Fidelity International’s Technology Director Joins Experience Everywhere appeared first on Nexthink.

The latest Nexthink release has rolled out, with a wide range of features to support the ongoing Nexthink mission – driving proactive, continuous management of digital employee experience across your entire estate. Our recent focus has been on building out virtualization support in the platform, continuing to enhance optimization of management workflows, and making employee engagement more powerful and accessible than ever before. Let’s take a deeper look at what’s new!

Enhanced filtering and playbooks for Experience Optimization

Experience Optimization is at the heart of the Nexthink Experience platform – providing a prioritized guided process for proactively managing experience. Since its launch earlier this year, we have had fantastic feedback from customers on how they are leveraging the 360-degree visibility across the enterprise to rapidly identify and resolve a wide range of employee-centric issues. Based on this feedback, we have introduced a range of additional capabilities to make the optimization process even more intuitive and effective.

• Enhanced playbook navigation to further streamline the optimization process
• Additional score metrics and trend data to provide deeper insight and more effective remediation
• Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Session-Based Computing (SBC) filtering
• Smarter cross-dashboard filtering and new sentiment-related playbooks to drive even more holistic troubleshooting and remediation

You can discover more about these exciting additions here.

A modern new look for Nexthink Engage

Nexthink Engage provides a rich, hyper-targeted engagement channel between IT and employees. Our customers have been successfully deploying Engage to ensure the right information gets to the right users at the right time, and to ensure that real-time employee sentiment information can drive the right IT decisions on an ongoing basis.

Engage now has a modern new look. Significant customer research was conducted to develop a new visual identity and personalized branding with the objective of improving campaign response rates and response times. Customers can update their Engage persona to create a stronger sense of familiarity and increase response rates.

You can have a look at the new design and features here.

Nexthink for Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) and VMware Horizon

In our last product release in August, we introduced new capabilities for monitoring VDI and SBC deployments for Citrix, giving IT deep insight into employee experience for both virtual and physical desktops. We are excited to continue this momentum in the latest release – we have now added support for Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) and VMware Horizon. Across each of these environments, Nexthink offers rich visibility during assessment, pilot and ongoing operation of your desktop virtualization projects

You can explore Nexthink visibility into virtualized environments here.

Delivering personalized IT with Persona Insight

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

Our new Persona Insight content allows organizations to deliver personalized, right-sized IT to each employee. IT is now able to make choices about what computing platforms employees use and can measure and quantify what business applications and computing resources each employee needs to be productive. This rich capability delivers multiple benefits – employee onboarding is easier, time-to-productivity is faster, and organizations can better align software licensing with the employee’s actual needs.

We dive into the value that can be unlocked through persona insight here.

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.

For a full description of the V6.29 / 2020.5 release, visit the product documentation

Interested in seeing Nexthink in action? Book a demo today.

The post The latest Nexthink Release is All About Proactive IT appeared first on Nexthink.

From digital transformation to infrastructure optimization, business analytics and data visualization allow IT stakeholders to make sense of complex situations. You can’t improve what you can’t measure, right?

More and more, we see IT organizations combining different sources of information to uncover unique insight, allowing them to detect areas of improvement, find new opportunities, optimize processes and gain that competitive edge.

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is a key aspect of any IT modern enterprise which can – and should – be used as a data source to explore new business analytics opportunities.

Nexthink as a data source

Digital Employee Experience management is not a siloed activity. It is a continuous cycle that anchors itself into every IT decision you make as you strive to become more proactive, reduce costs and improve the employee experience.

Nexthink Integrate is a vital element of this cycle. It allows IT teams to embed real-time experience data and key Nexthink capabilities into any preferred third-party solution to enhance their current IT ecosystem. IT teams can easily do this with Nexthink’s versatile Web API, Chatbot SDK and official out-of-the-box connectors, as well as with a more recent integration capability – the Nexthink Event Connector.

Nexthink Event Connector

The Nexthink Event Connector enables IT teams to convert Nexthink real-time experience analytics into pre-defined and relevant events to populate their preferred business analytics tools. This opens the doors to a wide range of valuable data analysis, correlation, management and visualization use cases.

Most notably, this connector has proven essential to Nexthink users with Splunk or ServiceNow be helping them leverage experience-level insight to improve business and IT processes.

For Splunk, users can populate and analyze granular-level events in a very short amount of time, which they can then combine and visualize with other data sources through custom dashboards. For ServiceNow, the integration focuses more on optimizing Service Desk efficiency by sending vital experience events to be converted into problems or incidents based on pre-defined rules. Both offering serious value-adding DEX features and insight.

In addition, last summer, Nexthink introduced a new event receiver capability allowing for a whole new range of integration possibilities – Azure Data Lake.

Azure Data Lake integration

Many IT departments use Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) as an essential data repository and analytics service, allowing them to store essential data and insights in a single place. This data can then be pushed and consumed in countless different ways to combine, visualize and make sense of raw data.

Nexthink allows users to send Nexthink real-time analytics to ADLS Gen2 in a highly configurable way for consumption on preferred external sources. This allows IT teams to collect and consume vital experience-level data around user experience, devices, networks or applications to gain a deeper level of understanding over specific IT or business scenarios.

For instance, let’s take a look at a common ADLS use case – Power BI.

Powering Power BI

By pulling the required data from ADLS—pushed and configured using the event connector— IT teams can create personalized management dashboards and combine different data sources.

One of our more recent examples is with the combination of Microsoft and Nexthink data to gain deeper, actionable insight into MS Teams call quality across the enterprise. In these times of large-scale remote working, such dashboards can provide additional, much-needed visibility of the technical performance and employee experience of a main corporate collaboration tool to proactively improve workforce wellbeing and productivity.

These unique Power BI dashboards allow users to explore and drill-down into the correlation of MS Teams call quality data from Microsoft crossed with Nexthink DEXinsight. This highlights critical insight, such as the root cause analysis of poor call quality or the impact it has on an organization’s MS Teams DEX Score. This can be filtered and viewed from an employee experience perspective or by looking at more technical details such as application or device warnings, errors, metrics and other essential information.

Watch the demo here:

Integration made simple

Nexthink Integrate is a key capability in proactive digital employee experience management by embedding vital experience data and capabilities across your IT ecosystem. Nexthink’s event connector is an essential part of your integration journey not only with ServiceNow and Splunk, but also with the ability to push critical data to ADLS. This allows you to populate and power unique and insightful dashboards for any specific use case to enable new IT or business objectives.

Power BI is just one of the countless examples of new and original integration use cases deployed by Nexthinker customers.
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To find out more about Nexthink Integrate, visit our webpage.

Or, to find out how you can leverage experience data in your current IT ecosystem, schedule a demo.

The post Exploring New Integration Opportunities with Azure Data Lake and Power BI appeared first on Nexthink.

With our recent product release, Nexthink brings the power of personalized, right-sized IT to customers, allowing them to deliver the right services, at the right cost to every workforce role.

Delivering personalized and right-sized IT services is only possible when organizations understand the technology needs of employees and, to help our customers, Nexthink has delivered powerful new capabilities. Persona Insight is a new Library Pack that helps organizations deliver the right virtual and physical resources to employees and continually improve their digital employee experience. Nexthink customers can go beyond department titles to more granularly understand the needs of workforce roles. For example, in a large software development organization, there may be front-end developers, full-stack developers, QA engineers, DevOps engineers, and security engineers.  If a company takes a one-size-fits-all approach to resource provisioning, everyone in the development org might get the same software and hardware, even though their needs are vastly different from one role to the next.  By tailoring IT resources to each workplace role (or persona), IT delivers a better digital experience to the entire workforce, while achieving cost savings by avoiding any overprovisioning of resources.

Another value proposition of Persona Insight’s ability to measure resource requirements is that this data can inform IT which roles are well suited for physical laptops, virtual desktops (VDI), or session-based computing (SBC). This allows IT to right-size budget spend while providing the right IT services.

For those workforce roles that are well suited to virtualization, the migration from physical to virtual must be properly managed. Virtualized desktop projects, both VDI and SBC, are complex and risk-filled undertakings. To address this, Nexthink has also announced new virtualization experience management capabilities built to deliver value across the entire virtualization lifecycle, from assessment to pilot and ongoing operations.

Finally, the delivery of employee-centric IT requires that experience management be integrated into existing IT ecosystems and workflows. For this Nexthink has announced new integration capabilities as well. Read on to learn more:

Persona Insight – deliver employee-centric IT services

Persona Insight lets IT professionals deliver role-optimized resources driven by deep insights about workforce needs, rather than broad assumptions that create employee frustration and wasted IT spending. IT is now able to make better informed choices about the computing resources for each role: physical machines, virtual desktops, and/or desktops and applications delivered via session-based computing, as well as the specific applications for each role.

Digital Experience by Persona

When it comes to understanding the different workplace roles that exist, many organizations either don’t try, or for those that do, they often don’t get any more granular than HR-defined departmental roles. The reality however is this is typically too broad a brush stroke to be truly valuable. As an example, within any department (marketing, sales, engineering, etc.) there are many different roles, and those roles can require significantly different computing resources. To look at marketing for example, the graphics team may be considered super-users with heavy compute and memory requirements, while marketing operations works heavily with cloud-based marketing technology tools requiring far fewer local compute resources.

“Employees consume a diverse and complicated set of IT services to accomplish their jobs,” said Belinda Schouten, Grid Owner, Digital Workplace, ABN AMRO. “Traditional monitoring and management solutions focus solely on technical performance data collected from the infrastructure and provide reactive troubleshooting capabilities based on assumptions of what is and is not working for the employee. With Nexthink, we start with the employee and understanding their activity and needs. This empowers our team to proactively identify, remediate, and prevent fluctuations in employee experiences.”

With Persona Insight, IT can measure and quantify the workforce requirements of these different roles, and then armed with that information, IT can right-size the computing platform and applications, while optimizing the associated cost – to make sure the entire workforce is successful.

Further, it’s not enough to simply baseline technology requirements once for each role. Organizations must also monitor requirements over time to ensure resources stay aligned. The one constant at any company is change. New applications, tools, and workflows are brought into the business, and individuals’ responsibilities and roles change as well. Persona Insight allows IT to understand these dynamics so they can stay ahead of the needs of employees.

“

Persona Insight offers a data-driven approach to understanding how employees engage with technology and what they need to be productive. Armed with this knowledge, IT can deliver the right services, at the right cost, to each employee

Expanded Virtualization Experience Management for the Entire Project Lifecycle

New virtualization experience management capabilities help organizations deliver the right virtual and physical resources to employees and continually improve the digital experience they receive. Real-time visibility and measurement of employee sentiment addresses the number one risk to project success – lack of timely understanding of employee experience and issues. These new capabilities deliver value throughout the entire lifecycle of desktop virtualization projects from assessment through ongoing operations, whether deploying Citrix, Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), or VMware Horizon.

As discussed earlier, in order to provide the right services, at the right cost, to every workforce role, organizations must provide and support a variety of end-user platforms, both on-premises as well as in the cloud. For organizations that want one solution to measure and manage digital experience across both physical and virtual environments – correlated with employee sentiment for full visibility – Nexthink is the only option.

Desktop Experience by Platform Type (Physical, VDI, and SBC)

Rather than a typical piecemeal approach where multiple vendors’ products are needed, Nexthink delivers a single solution for IT to manage the entire lifecycle of their desktop virtualization projects across Citrix, Microsoft WVD, and VMware Horizon:

1. Assessment phase – Organizations can perform capacity planning, quantify CPU requirements, and understand memory needs.
2. Pilot – IT can proactively measure employee experience and quantify employee sentiment before and during pilot projects to ensure that the experience is as good as, or better than, it was prior to the migration.
3. Operational phase – IT must ensure that employee experience is continuously optimized through real-time monitoring and troubleshooting. Common issues that cause experience problems (and must be closely monitored) are application load times, application response times, session response times, logon duration, graphics quality and responsiveness, and connectivity issues.

Virtual Desktop Experience Trending

Expanded Integrations to Make IT More Flexible & Resilient

Our new expanded integrations help IT to pull in Nexthink’s key Digital Employee Experience (DEX) data for their most prized ITSM tools. Integrations with technologies like ServiceNow make it easier for IT to quickly pivot, identify employee issues, and speed up their resolution times. In addition, our new Azure Data Lake Storage integration can be used to populate third-party business analytics services such as Power BI. These integrations empower IT teams to create highly configurable dashboards and access experience-centric insights that ultimately help them to better support their digital transformation projects.

Azure Data Lake Storage integration

Many IT departments use Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) as an essential data repository and analytics service, allowing them to store important data and insights in a single place. This data can then be pushed and consumed in countless different ways to combine, visualize and make sense of raw data. Nexthink allows users to send Nexthink real-time analytics to ADLS Gen2 in a highly configurable way for consumption in preferred external sources. This allows IT teams to collect and consume vital experience-level data around devices, networks, applications, and more to gain a deeper level of understanding for specific IT or business scenarios. As an example, a common ADLS use case is sending data to Power BI for analysis.

Microsoft Power BI

By pulling the required data from ADLS—pushed and configured using the event connector— IT teams can create personalized management dashboards and combine different data sources.

One of our more recent examples is with the combination of Microsoft and Nexthink data to gain deeper, actionable insight into MS Teams call quality across the enterprise. In these times of large-scale remote working, such dashboards can provide additional, much-needed visibility into the technical performance and employee experience of a critical collaboration tool to proactively improve workforce wellbeing and satisfaction.

In Summary

For organizations to successfully deliver personalized and right-sized IT services, they need three important capabilities:

1. They must be able to measure and quantify the technology needs of employees. Traditionally, IT has made assumptions about employee requirements based on static, macro-level information such as business department. This arbitrary grouping of users lacks both data and insight, and in most cases, results in a significant reality gap.
2. IT must understand the different performance characteristics of physical and virtual computing – both virtual desktop (VDI) and session-based computing (SBC) – and match those to the workplace needs of different roles. When IT can right-size desktop computing platforms for each role, they can reduce employee technology disruptions as well as cost to the business.
3. IT must find an easy mechanism to integrate experience management data into their IT ecosystem to automate workflows and streamline troubleshooting and problem resolution.

Want to learn more?

Speak to a Nexthinker today!

Bob Noel, Director of Product Marketing, Nexthink

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Allow your employees to work from anywhere and still maintain a productive digital experience

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The post Personalized Experience at the Right Cost appeared first on Nexthink.