Manage the continuous application shell game of constantly changing employee needs within large enterprises  

It can be tricky for large organizations to track employee software licenses given the multitude of applications and activities that continuously take place across the business. On a given day, a typical organization with 10,000 employees using only a dozen applications still results in more than 100 thousand application interactions.  Each of these employee experiences has the potential to create IT issues that IT needs to stay ahead of without going over budget. 

Then consider application license ownership. Licenses can be owned by a range of stakeholders across the enterprise—from IT to Finance, product development to customer support, marketing to purchasing—and you can start to see why managing and optimizing software licenses to match actual employee needs and use is extremely difficult. Such a dispersed environment can be extremely difficult to track, let alone optimize or manage.   

License quantities are clearly known at the time of purchase.  However, as projects move through various stages of completion, license assignments fluctuate based on budget or employee needs.   

And while there is always a normal ebb and flow of license requirements within organizations, the recent increase in employee onboarding and offboarding during the great resignation has significantly increased the pressure on IT to accurately track and manage software license costs while ensuring business continuity.    

The massive issue: unused and potentially unneeded software licenses result in rising costs. Over time, these incremental expenses accumulate, leading to expensive licensing costs that bloat the budget. 

 To solve this problem, IT must find a way to optimize licensing costs, and create a more cost- efficient software license plan, without hurting productivity and the digital experience of employees.  

Counting software licenses is not enough!   

Counting licenses is an important starting point for license optimization but it comes with serious limitations.  Manually tracking license counts across siloed IT teams and business owners gets messy – fast.   

Plenty of organizations have software and asset management tools to help track license counts, but over time, employee needs and usage patterns change creating license information gaps.  

What about vendor provided information? Sometimes SaaS license information is provided back to the business by application vendors. But this information is only accurate for a given point in time and is blind to constantly changing employee usage needs. As a result, relying on static license pools (that are incremented and decremented typically based on employee status changes) is not only inaccurate but also risky and potentially expensive.  The massive issue: the ever-rising costs of unused and potentially unneeded software licenses.  This results in unused packaged software lost on local drives and forgotten SaaS subscriptions burning money and creating compliance issues. 

There is one critical piece of data missing from all three of these approaches to software license management: employee usage data. Only when IT teams incorporate usage data alongside license counts and cost analysis can they truly optimize license costs in a way that still drives business productivity and value.

To solve this problem, IT must simultaneously optimize licensing costs, improve the software digital experience for employees, and look beyond simple license counts to understand actual license usage. 

Use Case: A Global Manufacturer Incorporates Usage Visibility Into Their Software License Optimization Plan

The IT team at a global manufacturer was struggling to manage the growing and constantly changing number of end-users and their associated applications in their complex global IT environment. Then management threw a wrench into their machine: reduce the software license budget by €50,000.   

This team knew there were unused software licenses out there, somewhere in the enterprise, but they had no idea which licenses could be safely reclaimed because they didn’t know who was using the software, and who was not.   

IT could not afford to randomly cut software licenses to save costs, and risk impacting the business. First, they had to understand which packaged applications were installed, and then learn if the software was being used. Only then could they effectively reduce the software license budget without negatively impacting business outcomes. 

With Nexthink, this customer gained immediate visibility of which devices had specific installed local applications, over time, and by location. They then quickly determined when each application was last used. They intended to use these software usage gaps to indicate potential candidates to uninstall and save costs.   

 Success! They found several applications were not in use for over 30 or 60 days, and some that were never used at all.

Before uninstalling unused applications, IT needed to confirm if the software was still required. The IT team launched Nexthink’s unique targeted communications to those employees with low current usage.

In this critical next step, IT confirmed they could safely uninstall several applications without impacting the business.  

See exactly how this IT team successfully optimized license costs without disrupting the business by removing unused software from employee devices:

With the ever-accelerating roll-out of SaaS applications, companies are more challenged than ever to balance the productivity of their employees with license costs – especially during a merger or acquisition.  

Unfortunately, the limited telemetry provided by SaaS vendors doesn’t make it possible to determine actual employee usage of, or need for, application licenses. After all, SaaS vendors are not financially incentivized to call out opportunities for license savings. However, IT is under more pressure than ever to reduce technology costs wherever possible – and this now includes SaaS applications.  

Use Case: A Large Retailer Consolidating Software Costs During an Acquisition 

This was the case for a large consumer products retailer and current Nexthink customer who acquired a small regional competitor. IT was tasked with optimizing SaaS licenses during the merger and acquisition. It was critical to business success to consolidate sales teams and their software licenses to align with the M&A business plan.  

But employee productivity was also critical to the success of the business through this acquisition, and to be productive, employees needed their applications.  So, actual employee needs for, and use of SaaS applications had to be considered before removing any licenses.   

Watch how this customer gained comprehensive visibility to the entire employee experience using ALL web applications across the entire IT stack allowing them to rapidly optimize their web license spending while aligning to actual employee needs and usage. 

As pressures to reduce costs continue to escalate, learn how to quickly optimize license costs and align with actual employee usage requirements across your organization. Schedule a customized demo today to see Nexthink in action.

The post How Usage Data Fast Tracks Your Software License Optimization appeared first on Nexthink.

Today’s employees enter the workplace with a new expectation: they expect to use the technology they want to use. But can IT really manage a workplace where you can bring your own stack?

Ten years ago, the concept of employee experience conjured images of well-decorated, comfortable offices, with ping pong tables and beer on tap. It’s a construct of employee engagement that now feels almost painfully out of touch. Today, as IT leaders focus on facilitating hybrid and remote work through digital transformation, they do so in service of employees whose ideas of a positive experience have dramatically shifted.

The increasingly employee-driven workplace has given workers more agency and flexibility than ever, a change that’s sparked the emergence of trends that once seemed radical, such as a “bring your own tech stack” policy.

It’s no secret why this sort of policy appeals to employees. Anyone who has changed jobs is familiar with the sinking feeling you get when you realize, sometime during onboarding, that your new workplace uses totally different applications than they ones you’re comfortable with.

So it makes sense that employees are intrigued by the idea of having complete control over their digital environment. But for IT, it’s another story. The phrase “bring your own stack” may strike fear in the hearts of service workers, conjuring nightmares of mysterious incidents and emergency weekend calls.

If you’re debating how feasible this sort of policy is for your organization, keep reading. Below we’ll explore the benefits and limitations of this new trend, and answer the question of whether or not a “bring your own stack” strategy can be deployed successfully.

Getting the Stack Right

In today’s digital economy, an organization is only as good as their technology. It’s no exaggeration to say that having the right or wrong technology stack can make or break a business. According to recent research from Accenture, 77% of executives state that their technology architecture is becoming very critical or critical to the overall success of their organization.

But what does the “right” technology look like? From IT’s perspective, an effective tool is one that is easy to adopt, rarely experiences issues, is adaptable to change, and offers a specific value to the greater processes and goals of the business.

Then there’s the question of ever-confounding question of employee preference. Because whatever tools employers are providing, it’s clear that many of their workers aren’t satisfied: according to an EY survey, 84% of employees are looking for better digital tools in their workplace.

Closing this gap between the tech you provide and the tech your employees want is critical in today’s employee-driven workplace. Employee preference isn’t just something to consider: it’s an essential determining factor in how successful a tech stack really is.

The IT Reality

So, employee preference is important. But how much leeway should a company provide? Is a “bring your application” policy even feasible in an enterprise IT environment? Even as a hypothetical thought experiment, a few glaring issues jump out immediately.

The first, of course, is security. Shadow IT is a major security and compliance issue for enterprises. If employees are allowed to bring whatever rogue application they prefer into the environment, that opens up a lot of vulnerabilities for IT to manage. It’s virtually impossible to standardize security measures in an environment full of unapproved solutions; the influx of blind spots all but guarantees that a bad actor or two will slip through the cracks.

Shadow IT also makes IT teams much less efficient in their approach to incident management. With visibility into every platform and application, they can automate solutions to issues across the enterprise to avoid repeated issues. But if they’re faced with optimizing a hundred different tools handpicked by employees, they’ll end up buried in support tickets.

The above issues pave the way for a third concern: the strain that Shadow IT puts on IT workers’ time and wellbeing. IT teams at the enterprise level are already fully loaded with tasks and projects. Add in an ever-growing pile of shadow applications, and IT workers have less time to focus on innovation initiatives, encounter more sudden incidents, and experience more stress and pressure as a result. And as we articulated recently on the DEX Hub, the employee experience of IT workers is a critical factor to the overall company’s success.

Is a Compromise Possible?

So, can employees enjoy the freedom to choose their own work applications without creating a nightmare situation for IT? The answer is: it depends.

For certain categories of applications, such as collaboration tools, a choose-your-own-app policy is entirely unfeasible. You can’t have half the enterprise on Teams and the other half on Slack. There’d be major communication breakdowns and data siloes that would hinder both the culture and productivity of the company. It’s a lose-lose.

But in other categories, there’s room for more flexibility. For example: let’s say your company uses a specific project management platform to keep track of every team’s individual tasks and big-picture objectives. A certain marketing employee uses this platform to keep her peers updated, but she also loves a different platform for her own to-do lists and personal project managing. There’s very little risk in allowing her to use this tool for her own organization and process, even if she’s the only one using it.

In this type of case-by-case approach to unstandardized apps, it’s up to IT to determine which employee-selected tools are safe, secure, and relatively inconsequential to the greater flow of the organization. But they can only manage a vast suite of work applications if they have the right IT tools, ones that provide app-agnostic visibility into the activity and performance of every technology, with the capability to proactively identify issues and push out automated solutions. Otherwise, they’ll encounter the same problem of a growing incident ticket backlog.

There’s no one-word answer to the question of whether bring-your-own-stack can be a successful policy. The complexity of today’s business technology means we’ll likely never live in a world where employees can choose every single tool they use – but that doesn’t mean IT can’t lead an initiative that supports greater employee choice. Armed with the right tools, IT can meet employees halfway, giving them more flexibility over their technology without creating an IT nightmare.

The post Bring Your Own Stack to Work – An Employee Dream or an IT Nightmare? appeared first on Nexthink.

• Employees bringing their own apps to work 
• The at-work experiences of the IT pros themselves!  

The post The DEX Show | Reality Bytes #3 – IT’s Shadowy Experiences appeared first on Nexthink.

“However much your VDI environment is worth per day, multiply it by 90. That’s the ROI we were able to point to right away.”

The complexity of today’s workplace technology means that all of our environments are incredibly unique. Two organizations may use the same platforms and applications, but the tactics we use to implement these tools are all unique to our own goals and business needs. But all of us who work in IT and engineering can agree: our companies’ success hinges on our ability to keep our environments running smoothly.

I’m a senior engineer at the pharmaceutical company AbbVie. In my primary role as an infrastructure desktop engineer, I’m the de facto application owner and my core responsibility is the Nexthink platform. Every solution that comes in and out of our environment, I’m the funnel point.

Specifically, we have a very expansive VDI environment at AbbVie. Many of our offshore workers, particularly our offshore IT support staff, rely on VDI to do their jobs every single day. We also have what we call “production VDIs”: VDIs that pull and send data to various business organizations; these VDIs are incredibly important to our production and overall business processes.

All in all, we can have as many as 8 to 10,000 VDIs running at any one time. As you can imagine, such an expansive environment requires us to pay very close attention to how our VDIs are performing on a day-to-day basis. Minor delays could result in major productivity losses – and a big incident, if we didn’t intervene immediately, could be a true disaster.

The Incident

One day, we received a call around 10 a.m. – the call that everyone who works in IT dreads, notifying us of a major slowdown in our environment.

That morning, we learned that nearly all of our VDI users were experiencing extreme delays. They couldn’t access their platforms, applications were timing out – VDI was, for these users, completely nonfunctional.

We spoke with our backend support staff, who informed us that every one of our rails was pegged at 100% CPU usage. The problem was: they couldn’t figure out what had caused usage rates to skyrocket.

Considering the number of VDI users we provide service to, this widescale slowdown posed major consequences if we didn’t fix it quickly. We had to identify the change in our environment that sparked this incident – and fast.

The Investigation

In this case, there had been a change that took place prior to our VDI users experiencing issues.

An Office update had been pushed out to all of our VDIs, and part of this update involves a service called SDX Helper. A breakdown in this update process caused our rails to become saturated, pegging all of our VDIs at nearly 100% — while the faulty process continued, never completing, rendering our entire environment relatively inoperable.

Fortunately, the Nexthink platform gave us the visibility we needed to scope this problem swiftly. We were able to identify which devices were impacted by this failed update, write a remote action to stop the service, and deploy that remote action to all affected users.

Additionally, we ran an investigation in which we proactively checked the CPU usage of every single PC, every 10 minutes. If a PC was running above 99% CPU with that service for more than 10 minutes, we intervened.

The entire process took about 45 minutes to develop and push out to our VDI environment. Almost immediately, the rails were no longer saturated and our entire environment was restored.

The Aftermath

While we may have restored our environment through our targeted remote actions, that doesn’t mean the problem was entirely solved. We still had deployed a service that caused a major issue across our environment. If we didn’t take further action, we’d only be putting a temporary band-aid on the problem rather than ensuring it never impacts our users again.

We submitted a ticket with Microsoft, sending them logs that illustrated what went wrong so that they could perform analysis. But anyone who has experienced similar incidents knows that these support tickets with major providers don’t get resolved overnight.

So we had a decision to make. We could remove Office or roll the Office version back to the previous version, hoping that this would efficiently solve the problem.

We ultimately took a different approach, one that protected our environment without rolling back the changes we wanted to implement. We leveraged Nexthink to serve as a watchdog while we waited for a permanent fix from Microsoft.

We kept the platform running, so that it successfully shut down the process if it threatened to repeat the same problem for any VDI users. After all, it’s not the end of the world if an Office client doesn’t get upgraded – and this process allowed us to keep our users up-and-running while we awaited feedback from the provider.

Microsoft eventually came back to us, informing us that they had a fix for the issue which would be deployed in the next patch. All in all, roughly three months had passed between the time we had the issue and the day the permanent fix was successfully deployed. Having access to proactive IT technology enabled us to keep our VDI environment functioning efficiently during these three months.

When your digital workplace is heavily reliant on VDI, as ours is, this solution was invaluable. Remediating a problem the day it occurs is one thing, but in an environment like yours, it’s even more important to have that proactive watchdog, ensuring the problem doesn’t sneak back in and put our users and support staff through the same nightmare.

The post The Three-Month Fix: How AbbVie Kept Their VDI Users Up and Running appeared first on Nexthink.

• Implementing sustainable computing initiatives
• The immediate measures of energy conservation in organizations with Green IT
• Being environmentally conscious without impeding employee’s productivity and needs

The post The DEX Show | Podcast #40 – “The Wright Side of History” w/ Geoff Wright appeared first on Nexthink.

1. What does the money value of time (MVT) concept tell us about modern IT?
2. How much of a role should IT play in training end users to get the most out of their technology?

The post The DEX Show | Reality Bytes #4 – Great Experiences on Sysadmin Subreddits appeared first on Nexthink.

Businesses are always on the lookout for cost-efficiencies across their digital workplaces – but in times of economic uncertainty, departments that consume a lot of a company’s budget and resources are placed under the microscope to an even greater extent.

IT departments in particular have been subject to scrutiny when it comes to cost-efficiency. Today’s workplaces are so heavily reliant on digital transformation to keep pace with the competition, and as a result, IT operations teams have seen budgets steadily increase as they architect new solutions, invest in new applications, and perform DEX-driven initiatives designed to improve the digital workplace.

When these initiatives don’t generate a positive impact to the bottom-line, those operations teams draw attention from leadership looking to reduce costs – and not positive attention.

Here’s the good news: a majority of IT departments can take measures to become more cost-efficient, almost instantly. Keep reading as we examine three major areas of an IT department’s budget, and provide tips for how to make these areas more efficient and boost ROI rather than drive costs.

#1: Hardware costs.

Every digital workplace relies on high-powered technologies to support their workers in the office or at home. These laptops, mobile devices, and desktop CPUs represent a large portion of an organization’s overall budget – costs that seem largely unavoidable, of course, as employees need these technologies in order to do their jobs.

Many of the costs associated with hardware are avoidable, however. One of the biggest mistakes an IT department can make is over-provisioning: providing employees with hardware they don’t need or rarely use to perform their unique day-to-day responsibilities.

Creating comprehensive employee personas is the first step to mitigating this issue of over-provisioning. With dynamic personas in place, an IT team is able to understand exactly what hardware and configurations an employee needs to be productive and efficient in their given role. And by digging into real-time utilization data, they’re able to detect which devices in their environment aren’t being used and then reclaim and repurpose these devices to save costs on new machines.

Then there’s the issue of hardware refreshes. Too many IT departments rely on a fixed schedule for when they replace a certain device. When an employee’s laptop is five years old, for example, they’re eligible to swap the laptop out for a shiny new device. A single hardware refresh might cost somewhere between $1000 and $2000 – but if you’re providing service for hundreds or thousands of digital workers, the overall cost of hardware refreshes can add up to something astronomical.

The problem with this traditional approach is: no two devices perform exactly the same. So why should there be a standardized hardware refresh age across the environment?

We’ve seen many organizations cut costs significantly by taking a new approach to hardware refreshes. When you have visibility into each device’s usage and performance data, you’re able to determine which “old” devices actually do need to be replaced, which ones simply need less-expensive software updates, and which ones are performing just fine and continuing to deliver solid digital experiences to their users.

Want to see a real-life example? Read this article to learn how one nonprofit re-imagined their hardware refresh strategy and saved nearly $400K.

#2: Software subscriptions.

It’s no secret that SaaS applications have taken over the software market over the past decade – but these statistics are still staggering to read:

• SaaS applications make up 70% of total company software use.
• Annual SaaS contract values have increased by more than 5x in the past six years.
• Organizations with more than 1,000 employees use an average of 150+ SaaS applications.
• More than 30% of organizations have spent more on SaaS due to the pandemic.

As these figures indicate, SaaS applications are a giant cost for today’s organizations. These applications perform a variety of essential tasks, from sales and marketing automation, to collaboration, to project management and so on. But are all of your company’s SaaS applications really earning their steep subscription costs? If you don’t have an airtight software rationalization strategy in place, the answer to that question might surprise you.

Start by analyzing the adoption rates and usage of the software licenses across your environment. What you’ll undoubtedly find is that many devices with these licenses installed are barely making use of them, or not using them at all. For example: if your contract with a project management support tool delivers 1,000 licenses, but only 500 employees actually use the tool, how much money are you wasting?

Once you’ve visualized the utilization rates across your SaaS application suite, you’re able to engage with employees who aren’t using designated apps and ask them for permission to remove the licenses from their devices. Much like with the above hardware provisioning strategy, this approach to SaaS rationalization will reduce costs significantly, without having an impact on the employees who actually rely on these tools.

#3: Cloud Integrations.

Cloud integration refers to the system that connects your infrastructure’s various applications and solutions, enabling efficient exchange of data and processes across the environment. Cloud integration is a cornerstone of most organizations’ technology strategies, particularly in today’s digital workplace, where there are more applications than ever before, being used by employees who work in a wider variety of locations.

But cloud integration is also the source of some of the most overlooked IT costs. One of those costs is a result of too many connections: because integration is such a high priority, organizations often make the mistake of over-integrating. When they introduce a new system to the environment, they spend a huge amount of time, resources, and money to architect connections between the new tool and their existing systems.

Operations teams can avoid these unnecessary expenses by consolidating software, prioritizing applications that already share data and don’t require additional manpower to create integrations. They can also migrate to a cloud integration platform that makes point-to-point integration unnecessary; this initial investment can ultimately lead to lower costs down the road.

This process will also help them avoid superfluous data transfer costs. When you integrate one application with others in your environment, the new solution must request data from those applications, and every time this process occurs, it generates additional data transfer fees and API charges. Using a centralized cloud integration platform keeps all your data in one place and ultimately reduces the cost of each new integration by mitigating transfer fees.

The post Top 3 IT Operations Costs You Can Reduce Today appeared first on Nexthink.

The post The DEX Show | Podcast #41 – The Future of Work w/ Kelly Monahan (Meta) appeared first on Nexthink.

IT teams in modern workplaces are no longer spending the bulk of their time troubleshooting and break/fixing issues. As in any service industry in the consumer world, IT service workers are now expected to deliver a great experience to their consumers  – the employees.

Managing the workplace has become much more like managing a theme park, where every aspect of its real estate should exhibit interest, joy, and fun; everything that makes up a great experience.

The Theme Park Operations Strategy

When the expectations of the end consumers – here, the employees – is to have a great experience, IT teams are expected to go above and beyond the basic responsibility of keeping IT services up and running. They have to bring in more excitements that can get employees engaged and empowered. They will have to keep thinking of new and creative avenues to make work interesting for employees.

Suddenly, words like issues, incidents, and break/fixes have become stone-age terms in IT, while words like productivity, engagement, and experience are the new-age priorities.

Let’s return to the idea of a theme park. The issues in any theme park might include lights not working, overly long queue lines for rides, insufficient parking, etc. Does this mean that in a great theme park, these issues, problems, and break/fixes simply vanish on their own? And consumers only see and feel excitement, fun, and great experiences?

No! A great theme park is instead one where the team has invested extra effort to first overcome these basic issues: they’ve learned to apply the right technology and processes to identify them on an ongoing basis, catch them before they occur, and learn how to avoid them in the future. They’ve invested in new technology to avoid issues in advance, brought in regular and continuous maintenance, and proactively replaced and replenished vulnerable items ahead of time. In short, the team has prepared themselves to keep the basic amenities of the theme park up and running non-stop without any hiccups.

This is a major step, and the most necessary one for the “theme park operations” team to achieve before they step into the next stage of creating a more exciting and experience-rich environment.

If we apply the same view to the digital workplace, an IT team has to overcome the long-haunting obstacles that every team faces in the end user space. These obstacles are the user-logged issues – the top call drivers that cause employees to submit support tickets. IT must be able to address these top call drivers, arrest them, and create an infrastructure to avoid them from recurring.

To do so successfully, they must also have a mechanism in place to monitor and alert them if anything may go wrong in the future, enable regular and continuous maintenance, and optimize every asset in the enterprise for availability, performance, usage, and risk.

Better Outcomes: The Modern Approach to IT Operations

To wrap up this theme park comparison, here are the two main lessons that both theme park management teams and IT operation teams have learned through the exercise we’ve outlined above:

1. Experience is an outcome, not a commodity. A great experience is not a “new” commodity that we can offer to our customers. It is an “outcome” of the services we offer to those customers. When our infrastructure is properly managed and secured, and our operations are at maximum efficiency, every facet of our strategy works in tandem to minimize the issues and problems felt by the customer – in the case of IT, the employee.

2. Seamless services are the first step to transformation and great experiences. We cannot provide new and thrilling experiences if our customers are still being impacted by regular issues. When we get basic services running without any hiccups, then we have the opportunity to create offerings that are more exciting and useful to customers. Digital transformation initiatives become possible only when you’ve created a seamless and smooth environment.

Yes! Experience by itself is not an isolated offering of any one service. It is the outcome of the services performing efficiently.

In end-user computing, digital experience cannot be offered or operated as an isolated offering. It has to be a consolidated outcome of all or most of the end-user IT service functions performing perfectly. This then translates into a “desirable digital experience” for the employees who use these IT services.

When you’ve minimized the impact of issues in your environment and enabled a desirable digital experience for your employees, you’ve set your IT team up for success in the future – a future filled with transformation initiatives that will surprise, interest, and delight your employees as much as the best theme park attractions.

The post The Theme Park Workplace: A Modern Approach to IT Operations appeared first on Nexthink.

Welcome to the latest installment of “Reality Bytes”, which brings together Nexthink’s brightest minds from both the journalist and technology fields to give listeners two perspectives on the topics that matter most in the world of DEX.

In this episode, the DEX Hub’s Sam Holzman joins technologist Oriana Ott, discussing two timely issues impacting today’s IT leaders and digital workers alike:

1. SaaS Sprawl and what happens when too many apps flood the digital workplace.
2. Automation anxiety: how do IT pros really feel about AI and automation?

For more amazing DEX content, including podcasts, articles and exclusive research, head over to the DEX Hub (dex.nexthink.com)

To hear more interviews like this one, subscribe to the Digital Employee Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Listening on a desktop & can’t see the links? Just search for Digital Employee Experience in your favorite podcast player.

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The global events of the past few years have permanently shifted us into a new era; defined by constant change, consumer-grade IT expectations, and digital innovation.

Successful and sustainable digital transformation relies on an organization’s ability to make informed, data-driven decisions; achieve buy in from executive leadership; challenge the status quo; and future-proof investments against economic fluctuations.

As a leader within IT governance domain, focused on driving continuous improvement to employee experience, it’s become increasingly clear that the link between business outcomes and providing superior technology to users has never been stronger.

As Egypt enters into a defining digital era where growth and change are constant; and disruptive innovation is rapid, adopting and embedding a truly customer-centric culture makes the difference between a bank surviving or thriving.

Employee experience drives customer experience.

A key competitive advantage in the banking industry is to provide ‘digital-firsts’ to customers that drive value, and that is most effectively achieved by prioritizing your internal customers; your employees, so they benefit from superior end-user technology provision and support that is consistent in-office and remotely, underpinned by an ever-present relationship with IT that listens to needs, preferences, and working styles, and proactively communicates.

Digital transformation never stops.

As an IT leader, gaining an accurate view of your IT estate and the right data at your fingertips to make informed decisions is key to empowering iterative digital transformation across the enterprise. Championing a bank that has a DNA of providing firsts to the market, sustainable continuous improvement is critical to future-proofing against disruptive innovation, the status quo, and other competitive threats.

If you treat digital transformation as a project–or a series of projects–it doesn’t have the organization-wide impact required for it to produce substantial change. A project is something planned, developed, and deployed by a single team (in this case, an IT team). It might have the potential to help employees and generate revenue for the business, but those parties have little involvement in the project itself. The IT team simply presents them with a “product” and tells them what to do with it.

Choose to instead think of transformation as a program. With this mindset, every innovation or new piece of technology becomes a company-wide process involving not just the IT team, but leadership and employees as well. IT sparks momentum and creates ambassadors and change-makers dedicated to owning and driving their piece of the transformation.

Executive buy-in and future-proofing

The “program” starts at the top with executives and senior management. Securing the buy-in of leadership is absolutely critical to successful transformation.

When you bring a transformation initiative to senior leadership, help them understand its purpose, and communicate what results it can produce in the language of the business, these leaders are far likelier to become sponsors for the initiative–advocating for it among fellow executives and throughout the company, investing in its success, and cascading that across the organization.

Running a transformation program also gives employees a significant voice. Constantly listening to employees through engagement campaigns that gathers sentiment, and pairing that feedback with telemetry insights from past and current innovation initiatives makes for a robust virtuous circle between IT, business outcomes, and users.

It’s no different than providing products to external customers – the user is the one who determines how successful a service really is. Thinking of transformation as an ongoing program rather than a project ensures that the user’s voice is always being heard.

A customer-centric culture

It’s important to remember that digital transformation creates a number of risks for employee experience. The goal of new technology is to help employees – but if that technology is too complex, the initiative will have the opposite effect.

For this reason, the way you architect an employee-facing service is very important. Efficiency and ease-of-use should always be the top priorities. Even a service that can perform complex tasks should be very simple for employees to use.

Remember, any new technology being deployed is being added to the many services employees already work with. If your staff is like ours, it includes employees of many different ages, skill sets, and technological dexterity. Some employees can adapt quickly to a new service and understand its complicated features and capabilities. But others will struggle to keep up, and productivity and employee happiness will become inconsistent across the workforce.

We avoid this problem by prioritizing simplicity before we provide a new service. For example, we don’t want to equip employees with a tool that requires multiple complicated actions to use, or an application that forces employees to submit requests in order to activate certain features, etc.

When we deploy a new service to employees, we ask ourselves: do we feel confident that all ages and experience levels will be able to adopt it and start gaining utility from day one.

Proactivity is a positivity movement.

Constant change has become unavoidable in today’s work environments. In every industry, IT teams can’t rely on the status quo if they want to provide great experiences, keep ahead of competition, and provide consumer-grade technology that meets and exceeds expectations. With that being said: the only changes that make a positive impact are the changes that employees embrace.

We have gained momentum in these dynamic times by keeping the user at the forefront of the changes we make. When employees understand IT initiatives, have a say in their development, and adopt them without struggle, every change is a positive one.

To achieve the same success, embrace this philosophy: As the digital workplace becomes more complex, the services you provide should become more straightforward. With this, IT positions itself as a future-thinking, enterprise-wide, cross-functional business enabler, as opposed to a cost to the organization.

As a next chapter, I look forward to continue driving proactive, customer-focused change, bringing governance to life, rolling out technological solutions that quantitively save time and resources, and implementing powerful automations across the bank that enable IT to continue to innovate faster and faster.

The post A Cutting-Edge Culture of Change in the Middle East: An IT Leader’s Perspective appeared first on Nexthink.

• How experience data and qualitative feedback has evolved in recent years.
• What separates a must-have capability from a commodity in your tech stack.
• The tactics that make or break a support model in today’s EUEM market.

The post The DEX Show | Podcast #42 – Top 5 Experience Enablers w/ Andrew Hewitt (Forrester) appeared first on Nexthink.

Mergers and acquisitions are complex. So complex, in fact, that up to 90% fail. One of the biggest risks for M&A failure comes during technology integration. At this stage, enterprise security, compliance, and employee productivity can all be irreparably disrupted. IT needs to walk a fine line between staying on schedule and maintaining stability. And to do this, they need to be mindful of the technology challenges involved in mergers and acquisitions, so they can stay out of the line of fire and deliver a smooth transition, keep the business running, all while maintaining a positive digital experience for employees. 

To achieve a seamless and successful integration, IT must arm themselves with clear data into the entire distributed environment, with a specific focus on a handful of key risk areas. 

Here are the top 5 issues that IT should focus on when integrating technology environments during mergers and acquisitions. 

Lack of Visibility

This is the most fundamental of all the challenges that can arise during a technology integration. Without visibility into the entire technology ecosystem, how can IT teams effectively plan, execute, and monitor the integration of multiple IT environments?  

Without sufficient visibility, IT teams are effectively making guesses instead of informed decisions throughout an integration. From blending the two tech stacks to making hardware integration decisions, without visibility into performance, usage, and employee experience across both environments, IT risks a failed integration. If your enterprise is embarking on an M&A process, you need the right visibility tools in place to prepare and execute an integration successfully.  

 Applications & Licensing

When two or more businesses merge, decisions need to be made about unifying their tech stacks and data environments. This process often plays a crucial part in supporting the business goals sought by a merger or acquisition. It is often exceptionally time-consuming and expensive due to the over-provisioning of software licenses and overall poor planning and scheduling. Over- or under-provisioning software licenses can hinder productivity and bloat IT expenses while limiting business output. IT teams need to merge environments in a way that is least disruptive to employee productivity, experience, and the business overall.  

Armed with the right tool, IT can get insights into how employees actually use the software applications to which they have access. Only then can you make informed decisions that will set up employees and the business for success, with the right tools and licenses in place, and the best operational and cost efficiencies identified.  

Hardware

Hardware integrations can be equally challenging, despite often being overlooked during the merger and acquisition process. It would be nice to simply migrate the entire new IT environment onto a common platform, but that is not always practical, especially in the short-run. 

It takes time to standardize hardware across a large, recently merged enterprise. And all the while, the business must keep running and employees should be able to remain productive. It is then imperative that IT has visibility into the performance of every endpoint. IT teams must be ready to monitor and respond to issues and irregularities from this new hardware landscape without huge spikes in MTTR. Tools that offer real-time telemetry, diagnostics, and remediations can maintain this level of service – and even improve it – but without this, IT is sure to leave employees struggling in silence, and business leaders wondering why productivity is down. 

Security & Compliance

Two or more IT environments at the enterprise level are almost guaranteed to have different standards and practices for security and compliance. Bringing those two into alignment is undoubtedly one of the top priorities of IT during a merger or acquisition. But there are risks involved in the process, especially without visibility into employee / user behavior. 

Shadow IT, bad data privacy practices, and outdated security protocols all represent a threat to the enterprise. Without visibility, IT is working in the dark, and may miss key vulnerabilities in the system. Bringing the entire environment up to the highest security and compliance standards is vital to the success of mergers and acquisitions, and to do this efficiently, IT must have full, 360-degree visibility to see, diagnose, and fix any issues as they arise. 

{Read More: How This Organization Returned 90% Compliance in One Day} 

Unrealistic Expectations 

The last challenge that IT teams, especially IT leaders, need to anticipate when planning for a merger or acquisition is not so much a technological challenge as a human one: managing expectations. Pressure can often be placed on IT teams to integrate disparate environments as quickly as possible. But moving too fast can end up being as costly as moving too slow. 

It is important to get the right tools to be able to effectively plan and monitor every aspect of a technology integration from start to finish, or else you will risk burn out across IT teams as well as the larger employee base. 

How Nexthink Can Help Overcome Technology Challenges in Mergers & Acquisitions

Nexthink is the leader in Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management with the first holistic, AI-powered cloud-based DEX Platform allowing digital workplace teams to have a single source of truth down to the employee consumption level of applications and tools. We bring unparalleled visibility and analytics across any environment, gathering subjective sentiment-level feedback from employees to enable the creation of the ideal digital workplace experience. We ultimately free IT to progress from reactive problem solving to proactive optimization. Today, Nexthink enables more than 1,100 customers to provide better digital experiences to more than 15 million employees. 

So, whether integrating two IT environments or ten, Nexthink gives you the power to carry your merger or acquisition safely and smoothly across the finish line. 

The post 5 Technology Challenges of Mergers & Acquisitions appeared first on Nexthink.

Today is one of the most special days in Nexthink history.  

I personally believe that founding and growing a tech company is mainly about developing amazing technologies which have the potential to change how people work. With the launch of our new Infinity platform, I feel we are truly transforming how digital workplace teams get their jobs done—not only for themselves but for all the employees in their companies.  

Nexthink Infinity was born more than 3 years ago to solve one of the hardest problems companies have today. With the rise of remote work, SaaS applications and Employee Experience, IT needs to constantly change things in the workplace without breaking anything. That means real-time observability, diagnostics, and automation at scale, potentially over hundreds of thousands of hybrid workplaces with thousands of applications, in real-time. And of course, giving all the features and capabilities that our customers have been enjoying with our current DEX platform.  

During these years, our R&D teams quadrupled in size, large cloud operations and AI teams were hired, and we extended our support to endpoint platforms like Linux iGel, Mac, or ARM. Some of our best engineers, those who developed the core platform, were fully dedicated to the architecture of Infinity. At the same time, we were able to bring on very talented teams of designers and UX experts to design the next generation of our visualizations. We made huge investments to create the best technology that end-user computing has ever seen.  

So what is different with Infinity? A lot, but at Nexthink we think about Infinity innovation in three main ways:  

See.

First of all, Infinity has been designed to scale horizontally over millions of endpoints in real-time and still give all the analytics in seconds. This works not only with physical or virtual endpoint data, but also as a full DEX platform that can analyze all SaaS applications from the end-user perspective. In addition, Infinity can easily ingest and correlate other types of information related to the employee’s digital experience such as Teams, Zoom, HR or Active Directory connectors. Infinity truly is one source of truth for all the DEX data.   

Diagnose.

Secondly, we have heard from our customers over the years that information is good, but insights and out-of-box alerts are better. So, with Infinity we are providing a completely new alerting module with a growing library of alerts that our best experts are constantly updating and improving. On top of that, the new Diagnostics module provides benchmarking and machine learning analysis so we can identify baselines, assess, and find the root-cause.  

Fix (forever).

Remediation and automation is a big part of the daily job of end-user computing and digital workplace teams. Nexthink Infinity includes many new capabilities in automation with third-party products such as CMDBs, ITSMs or BI tools, self-remediation via Engage and a growing library of remediation actions now directly accessible within the product at any time.  

On top of all these capabilities, Infinity has been designed with the highest standards of security, privacy (GDPR) and compliance that modern IT organizations demand.  

But the best way to understand Infinity is to just try it, and the good news is that Nexthink Infinity is available today and ready for all our cloud customers. We wanted to make sure the adoption was as easy as possible, so you don’t need to migrate your data or reinstall the system—Infinity is just there for you.  You can also run both systems in parallel until you are ready to only use Infinity. 

The last few months were very exciting as we were uncovering the potential of the new platform. From the first conversations with Infinity users we realized that this technology could also unlock tremendous value in adjacent domains such as real-time compliance, digital adoption, workplace sustainability and even software metering with better and faster ways of solving these problems. This is just the beginning.  

The launch of Infinity is a landmark moment for Nexthink, and I would like to sincerely thank the hundreds of customers and partners who have been testing, running early-adopter programs, and giving feedback for the last 12 months. Without all this support and enthusiasm Infinity would not be here today. And last but not least, I also want to thank all our amazing Nexthinkers around the world for this great milestone. I am so proud of what we have built together. 

Pedro 
 

For more information on Infinity, check out the Infinity product page and sign up today for our upcoming webinar, Nexthink Infinity: Solving IT’s Nightmare Scenario to see Infinity in action.  

The post Introducing Nexthink Infinity appeared first on Nexthink.

• Are aspiring tech pros learning the right skills to excel in IT roles that have completely transformed over recent years?
• How can IT teams reduce costs when they’re under the microscope of their executives?

The post The DEX Show | Reality Bytes #6 – From the Classroom to the C-Suite appeared first on Nexthink.

In June of this year, more than 70 organizations began their six-month trial period of a four-day work week in the UK. This pilot program, led by the 4 Day Work Week coalition, aimed to study the impact of UK companies reducing their work weeks from 40 to 32 hours per week for all employees, with no alterations to their compensation or benefits.

This experiment is the largest four-day work week campaign to date. Across participating organizations, there are more than 3,300 employees who are currently working four days per week, effectively getting paid for a day off every week according to their pre-trial salaries.

And at the midway point of the pilot program, new reports have revealed promising results for the future of the four-day work week.

Many companies plan to continue the four-day work week after the pilot concludes.

Throughout the trial period, leaders of the program have been gathering data from participating companies, aiming to identify trends in how well traditional businesses adopt to a seemingly massive shift in their workplace policies. As you’ll see below, the results have been largely positive: not only has the transition been smoother than expected for most organizations, but many say they want to continue operating with a four-day work week for the foreseeable future.

Here are some statistics from 4 Day Work Week Global’s latest report:

• 88% of respondents stated that the four-day work week is working ‘well’ at this stage in the trial.
• Rating the smoothness of transition to a four-day work week on a scale of 1 to 5 (with ‘1’ being ‘extremely challenging’ and 5 being ‘extremely smooth’), 29% of respondents selected ‘5’, 49% selected ‘4’, and 20% selected ‘3’.
• 88% of respondents said that at this stage of the trial, their company is ‘extremely likely’ or ‘likely’ to consider continuing a four-day work week policy after the pilot program concludes.

Productivity has actually increased during the four-day work week trial period.

The largest concern surrounding the four-day work week trend is an obvious one. If employees are working a full day less than usual per week, won’t that have a major negative impact on productivity?

Well, that question is one of the most significant ones the Four Day Work Week coalition aimed to address with their pilot program. And the results are surprising enough to sway even the most ardent skeptics:

• 46 % of respondents say that their business productivity has ‘maintained around the same level.’
• 34% say that productivity has ‘improved slightly.’
• 15% say it has ‘improved significantly.’

These figures point to the increasingly apparent correlation between business productivity and employee wellness. A number of studies have found that employee happiness and productivity are directly linked – and the results of the four-day work week program only reinforce those findings.

Claire Daniels, CEO of participating company Trio Media, says: “The four-day week trial so far has been extremely successful for us. Productivity has remained high, with an increase in wellness for the team, along with our business performing 44% better financially.”

Of course, there are a number of variables still to be studied when it comes to the wide-scale feasibility of a four-day work week. But this experiment is part of a larger movement that’s been happening since the pandemic: a reimagining of what “productive” work really looks like. The notion that “hours spent working” is the most important metric to determine “quality of work” has grown increasingly outdated. As more and more organizations show a willingness to participate in trials like the Four-Day Work Week campaign, we’ll continue uncovering even more insightful data about what the future of work truly looks like.

The post Four-Day Work Week Pilot An Early Success in the UK appeared first on Nexthink.

• Transitioning into a post-pandemic workplace with the economic insecurity we are all experiencing
• The secret to ensuring ongoing transformation is successful through growth and change
• Cultivating adaptability within an organization

The post The DEX Show | Podcast #43 – Transforming the Workplace Through Employee Experience w/ Patti Blackstaffe (GlobalSway) appeared first on Nexthink.

 Name: Moritz Mager

Job Title: Key Account Manager

Office Location: Central Europe

Pronouns: He/Him

1. Tell us a little bit about your role at Nexthink – what team do you work on?

I work on the best sales team at Nexthink and take care of all strategic accounts in Germany along with my colleagues. As a Key Account Manager, I have a number of accounts I’m responsible for. In this rapidly changing world, a customer’s challenge is often understanding how to keep pace with innovation, cultural changes, and IT developments. The key then is to identify solutions and ask them if they might be interested in support. Together with our technical experts (Solution Consultants), we explain what Nexthink is doing and how their challenges could become opportunities. Everything following is orchestration, my manager used to say. Being in frequent contact with customers, making sure everybody knows what to do, and working together with all our Nexthink team members in Consulting, Product Development, Marketing, Management, and Operations is my daily business. Everything leads towards a closed deal at the end and a new customer onboard. However, the job is not done then. It is still very important to stay engaged with my customers. There is always work to do in this very fast turning IT world.

2. Can you describe your career path that led you to Nexthink?

About three years ago, I joined Nexthink as a Business Development Representative at our London location. I was responsible for creating new opportunities, reaching out to new contacts, and booking meetings for our Account Managers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. With Covid-19 and everybody working from home, it became easier to meet people virtually instead of doing on-sight meetings. I was able to personally take over some of these first meetings even though I was still based in London. That was a great opportunity for me to experience what it would take to be in sales. Mid 2020, I had the opportunity to work in a transitional role that would put me on track to be an Account Manager. With some luck and strong support by several managers, I moved completely into our sales organization in Central Europe. Overall, I’m very thankful for this great career opportunity and the trust many people had in me.

3. What’s your favorite thing about working at Nexthink?

It may sound obvious, but I’m very passionate about our product. I really believe we give our customers a powerful solution to make their company ready for a culture change: putting employees in the center of IT.

I also enjoy our international setup and multi-nationality of colleagues. It is always very funny coming together at events throughout the year. Even working from home is cool because everybody is just a click away. In my entire time at Nexthink I never had a feeling of disturbing someone if I called them right away. I personally think this is outstanding and I’m hoping we will keep this behavior even through our rapid organizational growth.

4. What is a project or something you’ve worked on at Nexthink that you’re most proud of & why?

Oh, this is a tough question. I mean, everybody gets excited when a deal is finally closed. However, there was this one deal which took ages and it seemed to be a never-ending story. More than one year later, it was almost about to close but, in the meantime, there had been changes in our product. Therefore, we needed to discuss certain agreements all over again. But hard work pays off and we made it one of the most successful stories in 2021.

5. What are you most excited about for the future of Nexthink?

The journey the company is heading for. Our product development pipeline looks fantastic, and I think this is very important to keep our customers happy and satisfied.

6. What are 3 words that you’d use to describe Nexthink?

Future-focused, positive, exciting

7. What’s your favorite vacation spot and why? Have you been recently or have any upcoming trips planned?

Well, those who know me would agree, somewhere in the mountains. I absolutely love to ski in the winter or hike when the snow is gone. The rough nature keeps us grounded and sets everything in a new perspective. For me, these conditions are perfect to fuel up energy. I prefer to go to Switzerland because they have the most fascinating landscape for these activities in Europe. And thank God yes, next trip is already planned.

8. What’s the most played song or artist on your Spotify playlist?

Quick check on my Spotify 2021 recap: Outgrown by Monolink

9. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Always try something new, no matter how anxious you might feel in that moment. Use your experience to keep going with the opportunities that excite you. Push yourself to repeat this process again and again, never rest in what you’ve already done. This is potentially the only approach in discovering your talents.

10. If you could trade lives for one day with any person past or present, who would it be and why?

It would be someone along the lines of Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. Not for the fame, power, or influence. More to understand how they think and create something new. How do these people find their focus and what happens if something fails? In my opinion it would be really fascinating to discover what is achievable if you have almost endless resources to try something and any limits are most likely just in your head.

The post We Are Nexthink: 10 Questions with Moritz Mager appeared first on Nexthink.

When was the last time you had to ask someone to repeat something during an MS Teams call, or had to restart the app, just because the call quality dropped? Sounds familiar?

Frustrating, isn’t it?

Now imagine hundreds, if not thousands, of employees feeling this frustration at work. Think of the time lost for them, for the organization, and—more importantly—for those who’ll need to fix it.

As EUC professionals, we cannot let that happen. Especially with the new “work from anywhere” working trend.

But, to do that, you need to know if, when, and it’s happening. And that’s easier said than done.

Here is a great example of this problem happening here, at Nexthink. Lucky for us, we’re known for “drinking our own champagne”, so the problem was solved in a matter of minutes.

The situation

It all started with a ticket.

Dave, A Nexthink employee, reached out about a serious degradation in his MS Teams call quality. In every MS Teams call he joined, he would experience audio/video lag and jitter, drastically slow internet speed (300-400MB/sec down to less than 100KB), time-out errors, and connectivity outages, forcing him to reboot his device to get it back on the network. Understandably, Dave was frustrated at his inability to collaborate effectively with his peers.

{Microsoft Teams crashing? Read how this Investment Company’s team fixed the issue in minutes}

Dave’s job requires him to spend a lot of time on MS Teams calls, so the ticket itself was marked as “urgent” since it was a real productivity blocker for him. The service desk prioritized it to fix it as quickly as possible.

A 3-Step Approach to Find, Diagnose, and Fix the Lag Issue in Under 10 Minutes

Step 1: Instant issue detection on device timeline

The support engineer’s first instinct was to open the Device View in Nexthink, which enabled him to go endpoint-deep and retrieve a chronological view of device activity to precisely review and understand everything that happened on this device. This also includes telemetry from 3^rd party applications like MS Teams and how it impacted Dave’s device performance and user experience.

Immediately, a pattern unfolded clearly highlighted on the device’s timeline. Every time Dave experienced a network issue, multiple events were happening simultaneously. Firstly, the Teams Call quality dropped significantly and, secondly, an executable called DAX3API.exe would crash. On the timeline, it was obvious that his crash created a domino effect that led to Dave’s poor experience.

Step 2: Accelerated diagnosis with native search and investigations

DAX3API.exe is a Dolby Atmos Component installed on all devices with Dolby Atmos Audio Support to render audio on an external device. This clearly explains the component crashing during its activation when joining a Teams meeting with a headset.

Voila, the engineer now understood what was causing Dave a headache. However, further diagnosis was required to understand the scope and scale of the crash.

So, the engineer triggered an enterprise-wide native search and investigation to retrieve key details about this binary across every device, such as:

• the version of the executable present on the device and if it was up to date
• the different versions of the executable used across all other devices
• if any other device with the same version was experiencing the same issue.

The Engineer instantly saw that Dave was running the latest version of the executable and none of the other 142 users running the same version of the executable had any issues.

This ruled out the possibility of a versioning issue.

So, the support engineer triggered the “Get Application Crash Details” Remote Action to retrieve additional details about the executable crash.

And here it was, the exact context around the issue: the executable was corrupted!

Step 3: Remediate instantly with automated fixes

Once the root cause was understood, the fix was simple: reinstalling Dolby Atmos and updating of the audio drivers. The Engineer triggered Remote Actions that automatically deployed the fix without having to schedule any remote sessions with the user.

Problem Solved

The problem was resolved in less than 10 minutes.

Thanks to the agents installed on each device and the depth and breadth of real-time visibility Nexthink provides, no other tools in the market could have resolved this issue that quickly and effectively.

Indeed, the same set of Nexthink features empowering our Customers’ IT teams with —across every endpoint, computing environment, application, and network–are also leveraged by Nexthink’s own IT teams to resolve IT issues and improve the employee experience.

Without the relationships and correlations between multiple components Nexthink provides, the support egineer would not have had a defined starting point to diagnose the issue. The resolution time would have been much longer wasting both IT and Dave’s time from unnecessary remote sessions.

Increase your endpoint visibility.  Schedule a Nexthink Demo Today.

The post Microsoft Teams Lagging? How We Fixed the Issue in 10 Minutes. appeared first on Nexthink.

Are you considering investing in a digital employee experience (DEX) solution? 

DEX management technology has skyrocketed in popularity over the past several years, and for good reason. Since the emergence of remote and hybrid work as a permanent workplace norm, the growing importance of managing the digital workplace – both from a technology and a human standpoint – is undeniable.

But while many DEX management solutions can appear similar at first glance, there are subtle but critical differences in the capabilities these providers offer. So the question is: what criteria should you use to evaluate these solutions in order to invest in the tool that’s the best fit for your enterprise?

What Are DEX Tools? 

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) tools provide organizations with a deeper understanding of their employee’s experiences with digital workplace technologies. These platforms enable end user computing, digital workplace, and other enterprise IT teams to evaluate their technology ecosystem – not only by technical performance, but by the actual experiences that employees have as they use the technology.

These tools work through agents deployed on all employee devices which gather real-time telemetry data from the devices’ hardware, network connections, and business applications. While the real-time analytics they generate enable IT teams to find and fix issues faster, that is only one of the many benefits DEX technology can provide.

When used correctly – and with the right tool for your workplace’s unique needs – DEX management technology can completely transform your digital workplace, driving cost-efficiency while enabling employees to have more productive, happier experiences each and every day.    

The Top 5 Capabilities to Look For in DEX Tools

1. See  

A DEX tool must have robust telemetry collection capabilities that allow you to see issues as they arise on any endpoint, across the entire enterprise. Put simply, you can’t fix what you can’t see. The telemetry capabilities of a DEX solution allow you to go beyond incident tickets and identify issues which users either aren’t reporting or haven’t yet noticed, but still have the potential to derail business productivity. 

2. Diagnose 

Being able to see issues is one thing, but understanding the cause – not only superficially, but the true root cause – is vital to the overall success of your incident management strategy. For example: let’s say an employee submits a ticket related to an issue with Microsoft Teams that is preventing them from joining meetings. A DEX tool will be able to diagnose the root cause of that issue and immediately identify all other affected employees. That way, you can fix the issue not only for the reporting user, but for any employee who is at risk of experiencing the same problem.

 3. Remediate  

Remediation is a vital capability in a successful DEX solution. A healthy digital workplace is one in which problems are not only fixed, but prevented from reoccurring. After identifying and solving issues that impact employees, a DEX management tool enables your IT team to automate and scale fixes across the enterprise, so that in the future, you’re able to eliminate the issue in the “background” of employees’ experiences – before they ever know the problem exists.

 4. Combine Qualitative & Quantitative Data 

Digital employee experience is about more than the technical performance of an employee’s device. Getting the full picture also relies on an IT team’s ability to understand the sentiments employees express about their technology. Do they understand how every application works? Do they often get frustrated with a certain tool’s performance or user experience? Are they often experiencing minor issues that aren’t drastic enough to report, but still impact their productivity?

The best DEX solutions give you the ability to collect this qualitative sentiment data and combine it with technical data to get deeper insights that guide your strategic decisions. The classic optional employee survey doesn’t cut it in today’s complex digital workplace. An effective DEX solution enables IT to deploy personalized engagement campaigns directly to employee devices, gathering valuable sentiment data that will illuminate blind spots in their approach to incidents, provisioning, self-help education, and more. 

5. Benchmarking  

Lastly, the top DEX tools give you a combined metric that reflects all the data collected across the enterprise–both qualitative and quantitative–and allows you to set clear benchmarks, so that you know where you’re starting from, where you want to go, and can measure and articulate your progress to leadership every step of the way.

DEX technology might have seemed like a cutting-edge, new phenomenon years ago. But now, as companies recognize DEX as a fundamental element of their business’s success, the marketplace has become crowded with more and more providers of DEX management solutions. And although we know which solution we’d recommend, you have plenty of options as you begin your search. Whichever you choose, use these five capabilities to help decide whether the tool you’re considering will really be able to provide the value and outcomes you need. 

The post The Top 5 Core Capabilities for DEX Tools appeared first on Nexthink.