Welcome back to a special “Reality Bytes”, where a solo Tom is joined by Megan, Sean, Oriana and Dina to consider the timely topic of digital employee experience (DEX) and hype. The discussion follows the appearance of both Forrester’s EUEM Wave report from earlier this year, and Gartner’s Market Guide for DEX Tools last month.
Listen to the team cover the following questions:
To what extent DEX is a transformative set of capabilities, rather than just flavor of the month
How to select between DEX tools in a concrete, confident fashion
What the essence of DEX is, and whether it needs to be differently framed and promoted
See Tim and Tom host Experience Everywhere in London or New York, or catch the show in Paris or Frankfurt, across October (https://www.nexthink.com/experience-2022/)
Turn back to the clocks to just a decade ago, and Digital Employee Experience (DEX) was an idea that forward-thinking business leaders were familiar with, but was hardly the omnipresent topic it has become.
But today, DEX isn’t just a vague descriptor for how companies monitor their employee technology – it’s an indispensable thread in the fabric of their business. Yesterday’s workplace leaders might have considered DEX; the workplace of the future is DEX-driven.
And new research is emerging that reveals just how significant of a priority DEX is becoming among the world’s top businesses.
According to Gartner’s new Market Guide for Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Tools, “at least 60% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders will use Digital Experience Monitoring” to measure the performance of their services and endpoints from the employee’s perspective – a massive increase from just 20% in 2021.
While DEX management is gaining traction in a major way, there still exist some misconceptions about the sheer diversity of use cases this technology can account for. Many business leaders see the benefits of DEX technology when it comes to IT incident management– when in reality, the transformation they’re able to achieve extends far beyond the service desk.
DEX is becoming a board level priority for today’s top workplaces.
In recent years we’ve seen IT leaders face one predominant challenge as they try to implement DEX initiatives: they struggle to secure the buy-in they need from their executive board.
Improving DEX hinges on much more than adopting a specific tool and implementing a “set it and forget it” process to monitor employees’ day-to-day technology experiences. It requires a much broader shift in the business’s philosophy towards their workplace. Otherwise, IT leaders will lack the resources, budget, manpower, and internal advocacy to truly transform the workplace for the better.
Fortunately, the tides are beginning to change when it comes to how executives consider DEX. In predicting how the market will change over the next 12 to 18 months, Gartner cites the following:
DEX and the broader EX will elevate in importance as an executive/board level concern.
Moreover: by 2025, 50% of IT organizations will have established a DEX strategy, team, and management tool, up from 15% in 2022.
These predictions indicate a groundbreaking development in the broader workplace technology landscape. We’re not just seeing companies adopt tools that weren’t on their radar a decade ago. They are also creating entire teams dedicated solely to DEX initiatives – proving that they view DEX as an essential driver of business success moving forward.
DEX technology supports a variety of benefits beyond traditional IT service use cases.
When business leaders consider DEX technology, they primarily view these solutions as vehicles to make their IT departments more effective and efficient. Providers emphasize the IT benefits that their offerings provide, such as:
Increased visibility into employee technology performance.
Proactive identification and elimination of technical issues.
Automation driven by real-time experience data intelligence.
And so on. It’s true that DEX management solutions are IT tools, first and foremost – but as these solutions have evolved, the scope of benefits they can provide far exceeds an organization’s IT efforts.
According to Gartner’s research, non-IT use cases are critical to a DEX provider’s ability to deliver results for their customers: “Through 2027, 80% of the DEX tool deployments that are account for only IT-focused use cases will fail to achieve a sustainable ROI.”
You might be asking: how can DEX technology benefit an organization beyond improving IT service? Here are just a few of those benefits – and how they contribute to an improved, fully transformed digital workplace:
Boost adoption through improved employee awareness and education.
DEX technology enables organizations to fully visualize the process of adoption for each tool they implement and maintain in their ecosystem. If adoption rates for a specific solution are lagging behind their standard thresholds, they’re then able to deploy personalized engagement campaigns to educate employees on how to adopt and use the tool effectively, driving adoption in the most streamlined and targeted way possible.
Improve digital dexterity across the organization.
Not all employees start with the same level of digital dexterity, which means that some are more adept at learning new technology than others. DEX management technology will provide insights related to adoption and proficiency that enable organizations to determine which employees exhibit high and low levels of digital dexterity. From there, digital workplace teams are able to tailor their educational strategy to help low-dexterity employees keep pace as new technology is introduced to the workplace.
Leverage consumption data for more cost-efficiency technology provisioning.
One of the most ROI-driving benefits of DEX management technology is its ability to help organizations streamline their approach to technology provisioning. Within most organizations, unused software licenses and hardware over-provisioning lead to inflated annual costs. With more visibility into consumption data, these organizations can identify and remove inactive software licenses, reclaim unnecessary hardware, and proceed to provide employees with the exact tools they need to do their jobs effectively.
Reduce security risks by limiting shadow IT usage.
DEX technology also provides a number of cybersecurity benefits, as the right tool can reveal technology consumption that is not approved by the IT department. These shadow IT solutions open the door for a higher chance of a cybersecurity threat. Once these potential threats are identified, the team is able to either provide employees with alternative solutions or integrate those tools into the standardized architecture to guarantee compliance.
Want to learn more about where DEX technology is headed, and the IT and non-IT benefits of selecting the right DEX management tool for your organization? Read Gartner’s full report.
In today’s episode, we chat with Martha Heller, CEO of Heller Search Associates and a returning guest, to the show to tap into her expertise as an executive and an IT leadership guru as we continue to try to answer the question “what happens next?” post-pandemic and Great Resignation. Join us as Martha gives her best advice for how leaders can not only navigate and survive, but thrive through this season of uncertainty.
We discuss:
The impact of The Great Resignation on CIOs as leaders and resources
What’s next as CIOs plan for the future within their organization
How the pandemic has altered the digital employee experience, for better and for worst
This month, the moment we’ve had circled on our calendars all year finally arrived: the return of Experience Everywhere! And for more reasons than one, 2022’s Experience has been our most memorable event yet. As much as we loved connecting virtually these past two years, one thing is for certain – nothing beats the excitement and energy when the Nexthink community comes together, live and in-person.
So we pulled out all the stops for our live return, bringing the world’s leading Digital Employee Experience conference to four cities around the world: London, Paris, Frankfurt, and New York!
If you weren’t able to attend any of this year’s conferences, don’t worry – we’ve got some tremendous content coming your way from all four cities.
For now, let’s take a look at some of the highlights from Experience Everywhere’s first stop in London at the beautiful Andaz London!
Fireside Chats: Firsthand Stories from Customers & Partners
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“We put the end-users first – not only on paper, but through actions.” – Oliver Ackman, The Volvo Group
Without question, our series of fireside chats is one of the main reasons we were thrilled to be back live and in-person for this year’s Experience Everywhere. These wide-ranging discussions shine the spotlight on some of Nexthink’s top customers and partners as they share stories, offer exclusive insights and best practices, and reveal how they’ve transformed their digital workplaces over the years.
And this year’s London lineup did not disappoint! The day’s fireside chats included esteemed leaders from the likes of Fidelity International, AB inBev, HCL Technologies, The Volvo Group, and ABN AMRO.
In a particularly engaging discussion, “Transform Your Hybrid Workforce with Personalized IT”, The Volvo Group’s Oliver Ackman and HCL Technologies’ Saurabh Sharma (pictured above) shed light on how their companies have successfully navigated the new world of hybrid work – building workplaces where “whether you’re working from Starbucks or the office, you have the same experience.”
Illuminating Keynote Presentations
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“You have to build an organization around DEX…It’s about the people and what you do with the platform.”
In his keynote speech, “Making the Experience Dream a Reality,” Atos’s James McMahon captivated the London crowd with one of the day’s most actionable presentations, as he broke down the five essential steps to becoming a successful DEX-driven organization.
With firsthand insights into how to successfully embed DEX into the heart of company culture, measure the right metrics, and more, James’s speech left the audience with a wealth of best practices and philosophies they can immediately apply to their own workplaces.
And in the headlining keynote, Nexthink’s CEO and Co-Founder Pedro Bados took the stage alongside Chief Product Officer Samuele Gantner, unveiling the brand-new Nexthink Infinity platform and exploring the new ways Nexthink is helping customers to explore the possible, at any scale.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.“We started thinking very hard on this problem: how can we offer the next generation platform to EUC teams so they can see, diagnose, and fix – in the future?” – Pedro Bados, Nexthink
Last but not least, Experience Everywhere’s stop in London reminded us why we were so excited to return to live events: the opportunity to meet, network, and have some fun with Nexthink’s incredible community!
After years of connecting through our computer screens, our team was overjoyed to share stories over food and drinks with our incredible customers, partners, and prospects. Their energy, support, and enthusiasm for our collective journey top the list of reasons this was an Experience we won’t soon forget.
We were blown away by the turnout in London and in all four cities on our Experience Everywhere world tour. A special thank you goes out to each and every attendee that made this year’s event the most memorable one yet!
And for all those following along at home, stay tuned! We’ve got plenty more highlights from this year’s event right around the corner.
Welcome back to another edition of Reality Bytes, where Nexthink’s top journalists and technologists join forces to discuss and debate the leading stories in the world of DEX!
This week, writers Sam Holzman and Megan Brake sit down with technologist Oriana Ott, leaving no stone unturned as they break down two of the trends that are defining today’s workplace as we know it.
Join the team as they answer:
Is work-life integration replacing work-life balance?
Can IT really manage a workplace where employees set their own hours?
What makes an employee sentiment survey successful?
For more amazing DEX content, including podcasts, articles and exclusive research, head over to the DEX Hub (dex.nexthink.com)
If you work in IT, you know what it’s like to operate under leadership’s ever-present microscope. When businesses invest so heavily in their workplace technology and IT departments, they want to see those investments pay off and make the workplace more efficient – and especially more cost-efficient. But there’s one cost that has long plagued even the most well-equipped support teams: the cost of unplanned downtime.
The DEX Hub editorial team recently sat down with digital transformation expert and co-host of the DEX Show, Tim Flower, to discuss this timely issue of IT downtime costs.
Read on to learn how organizations can create smarter IT budgets, mitigate the costs of unplanned downtime, and much more!
Q: On occasion, organizations have to plan time to do upgrades or patches that create downtime for employees – how much can these planned downtime events cost an organization?
Tim: Whether planned or unplanned, downtime has a major impact on an organization. Downtime means a loss of revenue opportunity, even if there is a plan in place to navigate the gap in availability. If a revenue-generating function is unavailable, then customers aren’t able to transact business with the organization.
To minimize the impact of planned downtime, the best course of action is to schedule very short outages, ideally occurring in low business hours, typically overnight. However, if you are a global business, there is no “overnight” – you need to be available 24/7. So, in those situations lost opportunities to generate revenue are unavoidable. When you do deploy in the “off-hours”, you need to have IT resources on hand who can test, validate and deploy, which means incurring higher IT expenses that you wouldn’t have during normal business hours.
Finally, there is a need for high availability in application designs where the app and its data are able to failover to a synchronized copy while maintenance activities occur on the primary instance. These designs are costly and drive IT expenses even higher.
Q: While they are planned, they may not be planned months in advance. So, how can organizations budget for these expenses?
Tim: The first conversation around planned downtime should be with your stakeholders, where you can discuss and prioritize which applications are impacted. By creating a priorities list, organizations can adjust the necessary schedules, take any downtime overlap into account, and set appropriate maintenance windows as needed.
This will also help identify the mission-critical global apps that require high availability in addition to disaster recovery, which are two different and distinct designs. The shortlist of apps requiring high availability designs will allow organizations to budget for the design and implementation work necessary to avoid planned downtime.
Q: Of course, not all downtime is planned. What are the costs associated with the dreaded unplanned downtime?
Tim: Unplanned outages indicate a much bigger issue. It means that something in the design, implementation, or update / upgrade process is unknown to those supporting it, and a failure has occurred. Unplanned outages can happen any time, and as anyone in IT can tell you, it is usually during critical business hours – which of course impacts revenue. Unplanned downtime also means that the employees paid to do a job are not able to perform that work. So, the major costs are: lost revenue, lost employee productivity, and a damaged reputation for IT due to the lack of ability to maintain stability and reliability. And perhaps even brand reputation impact if the outage affects customer interaction.
Each of these costs grow exponentially as time passes waiting for a resolution as the count of outages over time accrues. This culminates into one additional cost – employee sentiment. When employees aren’t able to do their jobs, it drives frustration and lack of job satisfaction. Employees like to succeed, and they don’t like things getting in their way. Unplanned downtime can therefore lead to morale issues and even increased rates of employee attrition – both of which costs organizations in the end.
Q: How can an organization budget for unplanned downtime?
Tim: Most organizations don’t plan for downtime because they aren’t expecting failure. What companies instead focus on is making sure they have the right technologies in place to ensure there aren’t any unplanned outages. To do this right, organizations should budget for technology testing and validation of change, and increased awareness of the complexities that exist in their production environment. These each play critical roles in reducing downtime.
The scope of applications in the conversation of unplanned downtime is incrementally larger than those in the “planned downtime” category. Unplanned outages can impact any category of applications and the entire business in many ways. So, any budget should be spent on new platforms that increase the ability to test and validate change. It is a much more strategic position than just adding headcount to handle the increase in failures.
Q: Since most companies aren’t planning for unplanned downtime as you said, what would be the best way to mitigate downtime expenses?
Tim: The goal is always to avoid unplanned outages, or, at the very least, shorten the duration of a wide-scale outage. To do this, organizations should start with testing, which requires a full awareness of how the change is interacting with both the technology platform as well as the end-user of the app. This can be extremely difficult in a lab, even with advanced simulators and synthetic transactions. Budgeting for platforms that provide robust visibility into the underlying test environment both before and after the change is critical to understanding the potential for success or failure.
The second step is to enable full visibility of the production environment that will be receiving the change. Once a device, application, or profile is deployed into production, it becomes very susceptible to unplanned changes, or for the environment around it to morph from the original design. If the original design is flawed, then the risk of failure is high and different app versions that pose new and unplanned conflicts will occur. In addition, failures of prior planned changes will leave the devices in an unanticipated state. Unknown settings or components will function as-is but will fail after a change is made. Visibility into the production environment is critical for successful and low-impact change.
The third area of concern, and one that doesn’t get much discussion, is the unknown variable. For example, if an employee installs a new application that isn’t part of the company’s existing ecosystem, it could cause a conflict. A well-meaning IT technician changing a setting while troubleshooting an old issue may leave the new change vulnerable to failure. The manual upgrade or downgrade of a dependent application may cause a compatibility failure. The great unknown is often the biggest risk.
Q: Any final thoughts?
Tim: Mitigation of downtime is more than just increased rigor at the Change Advisory Board (CAB) or requiring IT to be more diligent in their testing. It requires budgeting for platforms that increase visibility and awareness of the current and future state environments, and ultimately lead to more intelligent planning and decision-making which results in more reliable changes.
Sometimes an IT ticket is just an IT ticket. But far more often, when one or a few tickets are submitted, it means there are many more users and systems exposed to the same issue. IT issues can quickly get out of control and affect many employees, sometimes overnight. When these get out of control, they can become “top call drivers” that bring your team, department, business lines, and even entire business to a halt. These emergency situations lead to wasted resources, increased scrutiny by top management, loss of professional reputation, and even job insecurity.
It is a nightmare scenario that all IT and Service Desk professionals fear.
In response, IT teams try to get ahead of issues by using IT alerting software to try and get ahead of issues. However, the reality is that traditional IT alerting software is failing you and your teams, and the situation is only going to get worse.
What Is IT Alerting Software and Why Do Teams Need It?
IT Alerting Software is designed to alert IT teams when emergency situations occur by constantly monitoring server, infrastructure, applications and more. When performance degrades, these tools raise an alarm to notify IT so that IT engineers do not have to do this manually or wait for things to fail catastrophically.
Why your existing IT Alerting Software is failing you
With the large-scale, permanent adoption of hybrid work models, employees are typically not exclusively using corporate networks anymore. Applications and even desktops are increasingly moving to the cloud as the adoption of SaaS and DaaS solutions continue to grow.
All of this is reducing the visibility that you and your IT team have into the experience that users are having with their technology. This lack of visibility is limiting your ability to see, diagnose, and fix issues before they become top call drivers.
Existing tools and methodologies are ineffective, as they focus on technology silos, generating unusable data that lack the context of how employees are affected.
PCLM solutions configure, patch operating systems, and deploy applications, but give no information about who tried to use a mission-critical browser application and were frustrated about it.
Infrastructure monitoring solutions can tell whether servers or sites are up and running or not and whether they are coping with the load but can’t tell which employees could not connect to those servers because they don’t have the right settings on their device.
APM technologies dig deep into the application code itself but provide no visibility into employees’ complete experience with these applications from their devices and browsers.
The big issue is that even if the data is combined from the variety of monitoring tools in use, it is still not helping IT avoid the nightmare scenario: top call drivers appearing out of nowhere, grinding business to a halt.
The Future of IT Alerting
For alerting to be useful, it must offer an early warning sign that focuses on the complete digital employee experience for every employee, every device, and every application, continuously and in real-time.
Nexthink Infinity provides a single view that helps you understand what employees are using, what they need, and what incidents they are facing – across the entire enterprise, all the time. All employees, all computing environments, all applications, and all networks and set in the context of how these all relate to delivering a digital experience – that is, how well the technology is working from the employee’s perspective.
Monitor What Matters
Built-in and custom alerts enable you to monitor the performance and employee experience of your most mission-critical applications, devices, and infrastructure. Whether it’s the responsiveness of key SaaS applications as they are being consumed or understanding when one app is crashing disproportionately across employees, Infinity delivers the early warning needed to ensure you and your teams are always ahead of potential ticket storms.
Intelligent Notifications
Once emerging issues have been detected, notifying the right teams becomes the next essential step. Nexthink Infinity notifies IT teamsof urgent issues in real-time, integrating into third-party systems, such as the leading ITSM tools, to ensure the right teams are always informed with the complete context they require, natively in their own tools.
Prioritize IT Response by Employee Impact
The issues that matter are the ones with the greatest impact to employees and their ability to work, not the infrastructure or specific networks.By focusing on data from the experience point of view, and gathering experience data from across the enterprise, you can see the invisible issues, identify which issues are impacting the greatest number of employees, and prioritize your task list to get employees back to work quickly.
Infinity provides the central location to view, manage, and prioritize the most urgent emerging digital experience issues affecting employees.
All of this comes together to turbo charge IT’s ability to be proactive, by focusing and fixing only the issues that really matter. Here’s a good example:
Use Case: Say Goodbye to Security Agent Crashes
After configuring real-time alerting for an important security agent, a US Financial customer was informed that agent crashes had suddenly spiked overnight.
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Upon further investigation, it became clear that the crashes were happening much more in one location, and that the problem seemed to correlate to a specific version of the application.
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After Nexthink Infinity had isolated the issue, quickly identifying all affected devices, a fix wasdeployed behind the scenes without any disruption to the end user.
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All of this was done before a single ticket was submitted by an employee – disaster averted.
This customer operates in a highly regulated industry. Traditional solutions looking at infrastructure or networks would not have identified the issue, and IT would have heard about this after employees started complaining. Nexthink’s proactive identification of the issue prevented potential compliance issues on affected devices. Also, the traditional burden of days of investigation time to identify the cause and the scope of the problem was removed. A simple but powerful example of an employee-centric approach to fixing a common issue.
Nexthink Infinity Keeps You One Step Ahead of The Next IT Disaster
Recurring issues are only an indicator of bigger problems to come. It’s impossible to identify and prioritize issues if you cannot see the whole picture as it happens. Nexthink Infinity was built to solve the most urgent problem we see in every organization we talk to:understanding the complete digital employee experience for every employee continuously and in real-time so IT can focus on seeing, diagnosing and fixing the most impactful issues affecting them.
This week we bring you a very special episode of the DEX Show – as we spoke with Sally Winston, Head of EX Solutions Strategy EMEA at Qualtrics, live in London! Ahead of her riveting presentation at Experience Everywhere, Sally sat down with co-hosts Tim & Tom to offer even more insights from one of the companies on the forefront of the employee experience revolution. We discuss:
CIOs and CHROs joining forces to tackle technology challenges
Why companies are prioritizing employee experience over customer experience
Combining experience data with operational data for smarter decision-making
Stable network connections are your business’s lifeline.
Vital elements of your modern workplace—such as hybrid working, SaaS application usage, and online collaboration—depend on good network performance, contributing to employee productivity and satisfaction.
But when network problems started to escalate for one of our customers, they realized they needed to look beyond their traditional network performance monitoring tools to solve the issue.
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“82% of respondents said employees’ happiness on the job is significantly impacted by how well their workplace technology performs” – Harvard Business Review
Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) tools are not always the only source of truth.
Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) tools have always been—and always will be— key to understanding the health of your network. But when faced with a decentralized workforce, they fail to offer context about the relationships the network has with every other element in the infrastructure, such as endpoints, applications, services, or end-user perception.
This incomplete visibility leads to network blind spots where network connectivity issues and network performance issues will continue to go undetected, simply because you don’t have insight from your employee’s perspective.
And these blind spots have dire consequences. With incomplete visibility, you won’t know if your employees can’t collaborate effectively, which means tickets can start to escalate, and both your Service Desk and Network teams could struggle to keep up – wasting hours of support hours, especially when you have to solve each ticket or complaint individually.
But with the right tooling alongside your NPM solution, resolving network blind spots at scale is easier than you think. Here is an example.
The Situation
A European-Headquartered consumer goods company received a sudden peak in employee tickets and complaints about slow internet speed.
But, when the IT and Network teams, headquartered in Europe, looked through the lens of their NPM tool, all lights were green – there were no bottlenecks or obvious packet losses.
Yet something was clearly wrong.
So, IT’s knee-jerk reaction was to ask L1 support agents to reach out, individually, to each complaining employee and schedule a debug session – a huge time and productivity sink for a support desk team already stretched too thin.
Taking a step back, the Service Desk manager asked his team to use Nexthink to troubleshoot this headscratcher, hoping to reduce the workload on his team.
Contextual Visibility into a Device’s Connectivity
First, the network engineer opened a specific ticket and drilled down into the device’s network view in Nexthink to map out and understand its current status and relationship within the company’s network infrastructure.
Through the lens of the Network view, the problem was clear.
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In the device’s network view, it was clear that DNS requests from Manila DC were experiencing high average network response time.
The DNS traffic from users connected to the Manila Data Centre was getting routed to the Google DNS of UK & US. This clogged up traffic, leading to abnormally high response times—almost double the average—thus explaining the slow speeds.
Drilling Down into Network Diagnostics
Now that the network agent had visibility into a single device’s problem, he could diagnose at scale. The agent didn’t need to diagnose individual tickets, he could actually identify everywhere this issue was occurring across the IT landscape. With Nexthink, the network agent easily diagnosed the issue enterprise-wide.
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Using the drill-down capabilities of Nexthink, the agent was able to observe that many other users from the APAC region were also facing slow internet speed issues.
This diagnosis highlighted two substantial issues:
Many devices in the APAC region were experiencing the same slow internet speed problem
The majority of employees with slow internet speed did not submit a ticket – they were suffering in silence.
With that in mind, the agent realized that they had been faced with a serious blind spot that was leading to significant productivity and satisfaction drops.
Without wasting a second, the agent opened a ticket in their ITSM system and flagged it as urgent to their Network team, including all the relevant details gathered in Nexthink to fix the problem.
Quick Fix, at Scale
Based on the inputs provided, the Network team got to work on a fix that they could apply at scale. A configuration change was deployed to resolve to Google DNS of Manilla.
By applying a single fix to every device across the region, the support team did not need to schedule and resolve each and every individual ticket. What’s more, they resolved the root cause of the issue, so they could be sure these types of complaints would not happen again.
Tangible Results
The network and support team was able to report their successful identification, diagnosis, and fix of the issue with clear numbers:
Improvement of Network Performance in 72% of the impacted devices.
Remediation of the issue on 1,893 devices in a single, proactive fix applied at scale.
At an estimated 15m of IT support time per device, the IT team saved 28,395minutes, or more than 470+hours saved of IT support time.
At equivalent standard US rates, this saved the company $23,500.
0 incoming tickets related to this specific issue were reported in the following months.
294% average ROI over 3 years
"After investing in Nexthink, customers were able to see significant improvements in IT efficiency. This resulted in cost savings and more informed, data-backed decisions".
When IT budgets are tight—and they almost always are—pressure comes down to cut costs, streamline technology stacks, and overall do more with less. And when a recession hits, you’re going to see your budget get slashed—unless you can transform your IT department from a cost center to a strategic partner in recession planning and cost efficiency.
While it may seem counterintuitive, sometimes an upfront investment in the right tools can lead to better cost efficiency down the road. Sure, it’s easy enough for us to say that, but where’s the proof?
To help illustrate the ways in which an investment in Nexthink can help you reduce overall spending without compromising the employee experience, here are five customers who used Nexthink’s unparalleled visibility to drive cost savings and do more with less.
1. How ABinBev Saved $241k on PowerBI Licenses
AB InBev is the world’s largest beer brewer in both volume and revenue, operating in over 150 countries and producing over 600 different brands of beer. When their Global Digital Workplace team investigated areas to implement cost savings while improving and measuring digital employee experience, they focused on optimizing software licenses and used Nexthink to find some answers.
Leveraging Nexthink’s intelligent Software Asset Management dashboard, they were able to visualize the cost and usage of their software licenses. One of the first tools they looked at was PowerBI. The business had purchased 10k licenses to support their users, yet with Nexthink, they were able to see that 99.9% of those licenses were unused! To put it more plainly, only seven out of 10,000 licenses were actually in use.
Pretty clear cut: they reduced their license count to only the seven they needed and saved over $261,000 on PowerBI licenses, without any negative consequences to the employee experience.
2. German Manufacturing Organization Saves $1.6M on Windows Migration
A Windows migration at the enterprise level is never going to be easy. Auditing hardware and software readiness alone can take months of work, and when you factor in employee communications, the process can easily become fraught with issues, where every hiccup costs time and money.
Nexthink’s complete visibility into hardware and software assets, combined with our employee engagement capabilities, help streamline the process, as this German Manufacturer found out when they embarked on their own migration.
With 300,000 devices in their environment, they knew the migration would be a heavy lift. They also knew from the previous Windows 10 1909 migration failures that if much of their estate was not ready to migrate it would cause massive issues. So, they took a new approach. They leveraged Nexthink to remotely see, diagnose, and fix every hardware and software element that could prevent a successful upgrade, ultimately saving them 32,000 hours of IT support time, which they estimated cost $1.6 million.
Hardware is always one of the biggest line items in any IT budget. And yet, IT teams have traditionally defaulted to automatic refresh cycles, turning over hardware on a 3-5 year schedule, irrespective of the hardware’s current performance. Recycling hardware when it could still offer two or more years of service could potentially be costing your business hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This large city hospital in North America had $2.5M allocated to replace 3,000 devices—including workstations, kiosks, desktops, and laptops. With Nexthink, they were able to assess the health of each device and understand which needed a refresh, and which did not. This process allowed them to keep a significant portion of healthy hardware in service, saving over $900k out of that $2.5M.
The last two stories don’t have as large of a dollar amount attached, but they do illustrate the power that even a single automation or self-help campaign can have on overall IT operations and spending.
4) Consumer Goods Company Saves $23k on a Single Network Fix
When a network connection is glitchy, it has a disproportionate impact on your employees’ ability to get their work done and in turn, on your businesses ability to produce and achieve targets.
When the Manila branch of a European-headquartered consumer goods company saw a sudden ticket escalation related to poor collaboration tool performance, they knew the tickets only represented a portion of the issue. Using Nexthink, they zeroed in on the issue on a single device and discovered a network reroute at the root of the problem. Then they were able to instantly identify all 1,893 affected devices in the APAC region. Finally, they pushed an immediate fix with targeted automation.
The estimated time saved for IT was over 470h, the equivalent of $23,500. And that’s not counting the money saved from lost employee productivity. All from one single, a quick fix from IT. Imagine how much more they saved over hundreds and thousands of automations.
5) How a Global Manufacturing Company saved $5k with One Self-Help Automation
What’s the biggest time-sink your team experiences? Most IT pros have the same answer: resolving tickets. And when tickets pileup, the backlog gets deeper, and top call drivers raise alarm bells, that adds up to a lot of wasted time. What if you could skip all that, and empower employees to solve their own problems? You save time (and money) that you can then use on strategic initiatives, and your employees spend less time frustrated with IT that doesn’t work. It’s a win-win.
When a global manufacturing company’s latest MS Teams software update backfired, they had a familiar experience. The usual influx of urgent IT tickets flooded the service desk. If they took the traditional approach, they’d spend hours resolving each ticket one by one. But with Nexthink, they were able to expedite the process.
They leveraged Nexthink’s unique combination of self-help engagement and automation to avoid the tidal wave of tickets. This involved a simple targeted pop-up sent to all affected employees, giving the employee the option to resolve the issues themselves with a single click.
The initial campaign had an immediate 78% success rate across 324 devices, saving the service desk over 100hours of support time, which was estimated at $5k savings.
Not bad for a single campaign implemented in less than one hour.
Find IT Cost Efficiency without Sacrificing Employee Experience with Nexthink
Look, it’s no secret we’re staring down the barrel of a looming recession. Businesses of all sizes are reassessing their budgets and finding ways to cut costs and optimize operations. Don’t let a shrinking IT budget have a negative impact on the employee experience.
These three examples show some of the ways Nexthink helps businesses save money while delivering an exceptional employee experience, but there are many more. Reach out to us today to discover how Nexthink could help you do more with les
The ‘last mile’ is a term used in the logistics and telecommunications industry to characterize the obstacles businesses face trying to deliver products to customers during the very last part of their supply chain.
You might have a world-class infrastructure, high-end technology, and the most sophisticated processes and skilled resources, but if your product doesn’t reach the customer at the right time and place, your business suffers.
And the same can be said for Enterprise IT Services.
You can have everything working perfectly – operating systems, applications, networks, etc. – but if you can’t deliver a seamless tech experience to employees, you’ve failed them.
Unfortunately, many of the issues you face come down to a lack of visibility. But fortunately, Nexthink is capable of removing those barriers and bringing unparalleled access to real time problem-solving.
Let’s cover key visibility challenges for enterprise IT and go over how Nexthink can help smooth them out by providing unparalleled real time insights required to address the 7 pillars of DEX Visibility.
1) Seeing Things from the Employee’s Point of View
Understand the experience employees have with their digital workplace assets from their POV.
The direction from which we approach a problem can make all the difference.
Many Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solutions approach user problems via Synthetic Monitoring, a process which runs tests in controlled and predictable environments to give you the closest scenario of what the technology thinks may happen. But this approach distorts IT’s ability to understand what is happening in real time and how that impacts the employee. In short, close enough isn’t good enough in today’s hyper-competitive business world.
Nexthink, however, leverages Real User experience monitoring, a performance monitoring process which captures and analyses all digital activities on the endpoints as the users interact with them. This way IT can know exactly what and why certain problems occur from the employee’s POV.
For example, let’s imagine you have several users that cannot connect to MS Teams. The problem could have been caused due to multiple reasons like an unstable Teams version, faulty VPN configuration, or an SCCM agent that is crashing.
If IT were to use a standard APM tool, they’d only have access to application performance data and little else. They’d miss out on critical components like PC performance, resource utilization from the endpoint, application stability, and network speed and configuration data, all of which offer more context about what the user was truly experiencing at the time an issue first begins. Without this data, it could take you a long time to discover the root cause of the issue – if you even can.
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Using Nexthink, IT teams can see what employees are experiencing with their digital assets.
2) Endpoint Deep
Can you understand the frequency and timeline for all digital activities and endpoints?
Visibility into the employee POV needs to be deep to see what’s truly happening on the endpoint and beyond.
But there’s much more to simply identifying an initial problem from the user’s POV. Is there something wrong with the employee’s device, or the network or the applications they consume? Are there other problems apart from what has been reported by the user?
Nexthink’s patented light-weight agent continuously monitors and reports all digital activities and properties (like network connections, program executions, web requests, etc.) from the employee device.
The data collected in the Nexthink Infinity platform is presented in a clear, intuitive view for IT to quickly spot check the frequency and timeline of issues, as well as investigate in detail single problem areas.
For example, just by looking at the below device timeline view for a user, you’ll see that the Teams application was experiencing stability issues (crash) as the user was experiencing poor MS Teams call quality.
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Nexthink Device view provides IT with insights into all digital activities and properties from the employee device.
3) Enterprise-Wide
Can you replicate what you see on one device across the entire enterprise?
It is not enough to have deep visibility into only one device. You need insight across the entire enterprise.
Of course, focusing on just one user won’t cut it, so how can IT expand their efforts across the entire enterprise?
For this, IT Teams need visibility that not only provides deep insights into a single device but also insights that are wide enough to understand what’s truly happening within the environment. How many employees are truly experiencing the issue? And better yet, what components of your digital workplace are impacted?
Nexthink provides Enterprise-wide visibility to IT teams, empowering them to oversee the whole enterprise, without any blind spots. IT Teams can diagnose and resolve issues for not only one user, but all the users impacted with the same issue with a single click.
For example, continuing the Teams call quality problem as observed in the previous section, with a single-click, IT is now able to retrieve all the other users experiencing stability issues with Teams.
NQL Query to retrieve all devices experiencing Teams Application stability issues:
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Nexthink investigations and native search empowers IT to retrieve enterprise-wide insights with just a click.
Nexthink further revolutionizes enterprise-wide troubleshooting with AI-powered visualizations called Diagnostic View. This feature provides a frequency and timeline of issues, and expandable information of who has been affected across the entire business and why.
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Nexthink Diagnostic view provides a timeline and frequency catalogue of all issues, along with other expandable information for further analysis.
4) Relationships
Are you able to view and understand the relationships between each digital component?
Being able to articulate the relationships between each component can give IT a series advantage when it comes to incident reduction and DEX management.
When Employees connect their endpoints to the network, it’s a no-brainer that those endpoints cease to exist as a stand-alone entity. Instead, they become part of a larger collection of components in a connected, interrelated network. This interconnection opens up a critical opportunity for IT visibility: Relationships.
The ability to access and understand the relationships between each digital component within the digital enterprise can equip IT with a tremendous advantage: you’ll be able to articulate how each endpoint interacts with other endpoints and vice-versa; how any given problem impacts a single user and the rest of the network; and how the problem propagates (how quickly) within an environment.
This unique capability makes Nexthink Insight invaluable for IT because they can now triage from one end of the digital workplace spectrum to another without hitting an investigative dead-end.
Continuing with the same example, because of the relationships built by Nexthink between all the digital components, IT can now retrieve with a single click, any information which would assist in debugging the issue further.
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Nexthink provides drill-down capabilities to make the investigative trail easier to follow.
5) Employee Context
Can you understand the exact context in which employees experience their problems?
With the right context about when an event occurs, IT can quickly assess whether they need to isolate one variable or intervene across several.
Context is another key piece that allows IT to understand all things that were happening on an identified device as well as externally when an issue occurs. This way, IT can identify patterns faster and pick and choose when to fix only the impacted assets in question.
Let’s take the same example from above. Nexthink equips IT with automated correlations to quickly understand which variable(s) are impacting the poor stability with MS Teams. In a single click, IT can retrieve all devices experiencing the same stability issues due to a non-compliant version of Teams, a task which would have otherwise taken forever to identify.
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The Diagnostic view provides AI-powered correlations for quick insights into events like an application crash.
This discovery unlocks what’s happening on the technical side, but there are two final critical pieces we’re forgetting about related to employee sentiment!
6) Employee Perception
Can you quickly and accurately assess how employees perceive their tech?
Sometimes how employees perceive their tech environments can be different from how they interact with them. Understand the nuances in user perception versus reality with Nexthink.
Employees are the most critical spoke in the Digital Workplace wheel. Unfortunately, they’re also the hardest component to predict and understand, especially for IT teams that support hybrid and remote workers.
Nexthink Insight offers direct-to-device, one-click surveys that employees can engage with and share invaluable perception data about their technology environments.
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Capture the pulse of employees with NPS-style feedback campaigns.
7) Employee Feedback
How useful is your employee feedback?
Traditional email and html-based survey tools fail to garner significant response rates and feedback data – data that could help IT determine whether they’re truly making an impact or not. Those tools also lack context, meaning employees often receive surveys after-the-fact, when they’ve already moved on to a new tool or IT service.
Nexthink Engage, a two-way communication tool, cuts through the digital workplace noise with attention-grabbing notifications to get your employees to respond. Instead of painstakingly handling one ticket at a time or chasing down employees who never submit one, Engage lets IT deploy (manually and automatically) onscreen messages as soon as an incident occurs. One pharmaceutical company, for example, used Engage and saw their employee response rates increase from 3% to over 70% in just one week!
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Nexthink Engage helps IT make employees the key stakeholder in their decisions.
Thus, Nexthink addresses all challenges regarding Enterprise Visibility issues through one integrated Platform, which enables IT to orchestrate enterprise IT services.
What can technology used to design the modern baseball stadium teach us about the modern workplace? You’ll find out in this week’s very special episode of “Reality Bytes”, where journalists and technologists join forces to discuss and debate the topics that matter most in the world of DEX.
In this episode, writers Sam Holzman and Sean Malvey are joined by technologists Oriana Ott and Dina Elshawaf for one of Reality Bytes’ most unique conversations yet, as they discuss:
Digital dexterity and how to close the skills gaps among digital employees.
How data is being used to optimize experiences on the most granular level – in ballparks and workplaces alike.
And most importantly: as we look back on the Manhattan stop of this year’s tremendous Experience Everywhere event, you’ll get answers to the most important question of all – where do Nexthink’s top writers and technologists stand in the debate around New York City hot dogs?
For more amazing DEX content, including podcasts, articles and exclusive research, head over to the DEX Hub (dex.nexthink.com)
This year’s Experience Everywhere is in the books – and just as we expected, the New York crowd helped us end this unforgettable four-city tour on a high note. We knew we had to bring something special for our big return to a live conference, and our incredible attendees and a star-studded lineup of speakers helped us do just that.
The final stop in New York featured many of our most powerful sessions yet, as experts from some of the world’s most successful businesses graced the stage and delivered insights into the real experience of implementing the Nexthink platform and embracing a DEX strategy at the enterprise level you simply can’t find anywhere else.
If you weren’t able to attend the event – or you want to revisit some of the most memorable moments – keep reading! We’ve put together some of the Experience Everywhere highlights that captivated, informed, and inspired this year’s tremendous New York audience.
“Infinity & The Rise of DEXOps”: An Illuminating Keynote from Nexthink Leaders
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“We need to see what is going on because it’s continually changing; we need to diagnose, to understand where are the problems and opportunities for improvement; and then we need to automate, to fix at a scale. This is what Infinity’s about: doing these three things extremely well.” – Pedro Bados, Nexthink CEO
In their headlining keynote session, Nexthink CEO Pedro Bados and Chief Product Officer Samuele Gantner pulled back the curtain to tell the story of how far Nexthink has come – and more importantly, where it’s going next.
Pedro and Sam covered everything from Nexthink’s growth as an organization to its evolution into a SaaS-based platform, one that enables customers to innovate at rapid speed and deliver more value, quicker than ever before.
And most importantly: they gave the New York crowd a firsthand look into the new Nexthink Infinity platform! They revealed the unique capabilities that will help businesses to innovate and reduce costs; digital workplace teams to see, diagnose, and fix issues; and employees to enjoy a stable work-from-anywhere environment where they never have to open a ticket.
If you missed out on attending Experience live, check out Pedro & Sam’s keynote here to learn why Nexthink Infinity is driving the future of the digital workplace.
“Early Milestones on the Path to Proactive IT” & Other Stellar Customer Panels
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“Being able to see with Nexthink we had a very clear issue with a VPN, we could go to that vendor, get a new update, deploy it – and then see that the problem went away; that was one of the biggest wins we’ve had.” – Kelly Watson, Southern Company
The New York audience was treated to a number of illuminating panel discussions featuring Nexthink’s star customers – including Liberty Mutual, Blackstone, Johnson and Johnson, and more.
These panels gave attendees a firsthand look into the many ways Nexthink and its customers have worked side-by-side to build some of the world’s most innovative data-driven workplaces.
In their panel “Early Milestones on the Path to Proactive IT”, Southern Company’s Kelly Watson was joined by Mark Milano of Eversource and Pat Philbin of AmerisourceBergen, as they each offered unique stories about their companies’ initial steps to evolve from traditional IT service to truly proactive digital workplace improvement.
Over the course of their conversation, these three IT leaders detailed their early expectations, first Nexthink use cases, and current plans for the future – ultimately answering a very important question on the minds of many attendees: What does the first year of the Nexthink journey look like?
“You Can’t Unsee What We Have Seen”: How Accenture Manages the Experience of Over 700k Endpoints
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“You can’t use tickets to manage your workforce, people are just tolerant of the way things are.” – Jason Bentz, Accenture
In a unique presentation from both a Nexthink customer and partner rolled into one, Mike Holzman, Global Digital Workplace Lead, and Jason Bentz, Design Experience Senior Manager of Accenture took to the Experience stage to share their perspective on managing hybrid workforces and real-world examples of the problems they’ve been able to solve across their 700,000 endpoints.
From the first time they stood up a Nexthink dashboard and thought, “We can’t unsee what we have seen,” to discovering a user in Australia whose device took 27 minutes to reboot and yet had never submitted a ticket, Mike and Jason shared their vision for the future of work, and the nuts and bolts work it takes to get there.
“The Right People in the Room” & More Fireside Chats
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“When we start having conversations across the lines of business – with HR, with sales, with manufacturing – then we start adding more and more value. It’s not just a cost takeout or an optimization – it’s actually value back to the business.” – Erik Jost, Wipro
The cozy fireside chats have been a fan favorite at every Experience Everywhere stop – and the New York event was no different. In a series of candid conversations, Nexthink partners and customers captivated the audience with fresh analysis and predictions about many of the trends shaping the world of work as we know it.
For example: in their session “Getting the Right People in the Room”, Wipro’s Erik Jost and Qualtrics’s Matt Evans explore the relationship between IT and HR that has become integral to the success of a modern digital workplace.
While this trend has been garnering much attention over the past few years, Erik and Matt offer their fresh perspectives to answer the most important question: how can you actually make an IT-HR partnership a reality?
They discussed everything from methods for combining employee sentiment and technical data, to the specific IT and HR employees who should have seats at the table when it comes to digital workplace decision-making. As some of the foremost experts on workplace transformation, Erik and Matt left no stone unturned in analyzing the structures necessary to increasing employee engagement, boosting retention, and building cost-efficient, DEX-driven workplaces.
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While we were sad to say goodbye to everyone who joined us in New York, Frankfurt, Paris, and London, the Experience journey is far from over! Stay tuned for more exclusive content featuring some of the brilliant guests that made 2022’s Experience one we’ll never forget.
And if you weren’t able to attend any of this year’s stops, don’t worry – we don’t call it Experience Everywhere for nothing! Check out our on-demand site to view this year’s top speeches and conversations in full, wherever you are.
“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.
This week we bring you another special “live from the road” episode of the DEX Show – as we sat down with Southwest Airlines’ Derek Whisenhunt ahead of his amazing talk at Experience Everywhere in New York City!
If you’ve ever wondered what separates a best-in-class airline from the rest of the pack, this episode’s for you. Derek reveals how Southwest has built its reputation for stellar customer experience, as well as:
How old-fashioned business models can evolve rapidly in the era of digitization.
Why digital employee experience and customer experience are two sides of the same coin.
Strategies to improve DEX for employees on the ground and in the air.
In today’s era of “Work from anywhere”, Data Security & Data Encryption has become a vital security step for organisations world-wide and a key component for security compliance. BitLocker is one of the popular Software Stacks for enforcing encryption on all devices & drives.
Exponential complexity for managing the encryption compliance and the backup of the recovery keys for all devices in the organization has increasingly become a key challenge for EUC Professionals.
The Challenge
Traditionally, corporate devices were domain joined to on-premises Active Directory (AD) and EUC teams leveraged Group Policies to automatically save the BitLocker Recovery Key in AD.
However, as these organisations move from on-premises AD to cloud based Azure AD or hybrid AD setup, there comes a challenge of managing the backup of BitLocker Recovery Key due to dedicated configurations required to enforce the backup.
Even when all configurations are correct, there is no guarantee that the recovery key gets backed up due to issue like network interruption, local device related issues etc. This results in BitLocker Recovery Key being available on either, both or none of the ADs.
IT Teams face constraints in resolving the BitLocker Recovery Key backup issue, such as:
No default mechanism to sync the Recovery Key between AD and Azure AD
When an enterprise is on a hybrid setup, it is difficult to identify accurately the Active Directory (AD or AAD) to which the Recovery Key might have synced, and which system may be storing the accurate key
Impossible to identify the impacted machines with discrepancy due to high-security controls in place for Recovery Keys
Let us look at an example of how the EUC Team of a large multinational IT Consulting organization successfully enforced BitLocker Recovery Key Backup on 700 thousand devices using Nexthink.
The Situation
Suddenly, out of the blue, users started seeing this:
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“Ah! Seriously? Again? How can I get rid of this screen”, exclaimed the Sales Director, who was unable to login to his machine due to a prompt that was asking for recovery key he had no clue about.
Annoyed and frustrated, he reached out to the helpdesk for assistance.
Realizing the prompt to be from BitLocker, the helpdesk analyst went to retrieve the backed-up BitLocker Recovery Key, he was surprized to realize that it wasn’t available either in the Active directory or on Azure AD.
Not seeing any other way to help the Director, IT had to reset the device and restore the data from OneDrive. Luckily, the Director had all data backed up in OneDrive and hence did not face any major data loss. However, the Director lost 3 days while the IT team was working to get his device up and running again and this led to a major escalation within the EUC Team and IT Organization as a whole.
Now, imagine BitLocker Recovery Key not being backed up for hundreds, if not for thousands of employees and them facing the same issue. Think of the time each employee would lose – more importantly, the amount of data loss it could lead to; That would be CATASTROPHIC.
Understanding that this issue could snowball into a major problem especially since the organization was in the process of migrating from on-premises AD to Azure AD, a team was setup at the behest of the EUC Director to design a solution, so that no other employee would have their devices restored because of the BitLocker Recovery Key not being backed up.
A 3-Step Approach to Eliminate the BitLocker Recovery Key Backup Compliance Issue
Step 1 – Understanding the Challenge
Immediately after constitution, the team went about analysing the root cause for the compliance issue and upon thorough investigation, were able to summarize the challenges under two points
Discrepancy in the BitLocker Recovery Key between the on-premises AD and Azure AD
Sync issues between systems – Workstation, AD & Azure AD, causing BitLocker Recovery Key to not backup
Both issues stemmed from various IT issues like
Multiple Domains
A combination of domain joined, and non-domain joined devices
Complex IT management setup comprising of multiple configuration toolset
Complex and time-consuming migration activities
Hybrid work setup
Step 2 – Designing a Solution
Now that the team had identified the cause, the solution was simple, they had to force a sync of the recovery key to back up the keys to the on-premises or Azure AD. Since the organization was on a hybrid setup and yet to completely migrate to Azure AD, the team decided to force the recovery key to back up on the on-premises AD.
The team had to simply push a PowerShell Script to all devices to force the backup of recovery key to on-premises AD. The snippet of the script to back up the recovery key is as below –
Refer the documentationfrom Microsoft for more details
Step 3 – The approach to Eliminate BitLocker Recovery Key Backup compliance
Even though the team had the solution, deploying the solution across the entire fleet was easier said than done. Having complete cognisance of the complexity of the IT setup of the organization, the team understood that they could not rely on traditional configuration management solutions like SCCM or Intune to deploy the fix due to issues like lack of broad coverage, reporting capabilities, orchestration etc.
Hence, the team decided to leverage the recently deployed experience management platform, Nexthink as it gave the team some advantages like
Broad coverage: Nexthink was deployed on 99% of the devices within the organization
Robust automation engine: Ability to securely deploy and execute PowerShell scripts remotely and repeatedly
Hybrid Work Setup friendly: Ability to deploy and execute automation irrespective of the employee work style
Intuitive Dashboarding: Ability to track the progress of compliance through Intuitive dashboards
Thus, a Nexthink Automation script was targeted on the entire organization to force the upload of the Recovery key to AD. This action was further tracked by monitoring Event IDs on the workstations.
The Below Event IDs confirmed the state & situation on each workstation –
Event 783 – The Recovery Key was already present in AD
Event 784 – The Recovery Key was backed up in AD (Potential problematic device, where the key was not previously present in AD)
Event 785 – The Recovery Key failed to back up (Potential manual effort post the solution)
Outcome
Within a span of a week, the script was successfully deployed across all the devices of the organization and was able to backup recovery key from 85K devices (devices with Recovery Key backed up in Azure AD + devices with Recovery Key not backed up) to AD and verify existence of the recovery key in AD for 550K devices.
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.
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.
In this episode, writers Sam Holzman and Megan Brake are joined by technologists Oriana Ott and Dina Elshawaf to consider some of the most notable customer presentations from the Experience Everywhere 2022 world tour.
Megan picks a fascinating story from the Experience New York, where Gary Sherman from Liberty Mutual shared with his panel how the insurer was able to correlate individual performance at their call-center with DEX – and improve both together.
Sam’s selects the ‘Early Milestones on the Path to Proactive IT’ panel (also from Experience New York), featuring Kelley Watson of Southern Company and Mark Milano of Eversource discussing early use cases and quick wins.
The Great Recession of the mid-2000s forced businesses and workers to navigate a period of economic hardship many had never experienced before. Drastic changes rippled through companies around the world, including:
Innovation projects grounded to a halt.
Employees were laid off, saw their career trajectories stall out, and faced unprecedented job insecurity.
Business leaders tightened budgets and looked for ways to keep their companies afloat until the recession ended.
These same hardships also affected companies and their employees in the wake of the pandemic, and continue to do so as we face a period of prolonged economic instability. But the workplaces of today are radically different from the ones that confronted these challenges nearly two decades ago. The pandemic pressed the fast-forward button on digital transformation. And the rise of hybrid work has redefined our understanding of the workplace itself.
Despite how different of a landscape we find ourselves in, there are still many lessons we can learn from previous recessions that can help us navigate the challenges we’re faced with today. Having worked in the IT space for several decades, I learned many of these lessons firsthand – and I’ll share them with you now.
Innovation costs: IT leaders must align technology investments to business objectives.
When the Great Recession hit, I was working for a global architects practice that was midway through a significant expansion into the UAE region. Construction projects across the world grounded to a halt, which put a stop to our expansion. With our strategic project work sidelined, our top priority was now to keep the lights on and make do with what we had.
But this didn’t mean we stopped innovating or looking at ways to streamline and improve the IT services we delivered. In fact, in the midst of the recession we made the decision to move to G-Suite for Business, Google’s SaaS-based email service. And towards the tail end of the recession, we started that project, becoming one of the first UK companies to do so. Looking back, this was a big leap of faith given the economic instability and the immaturity of cloud-based services, but it was a decision that paid off, and it changed the way the company connected and collaborated internally and externally with customers.
These projects represent the first major lesson from the Great Recession that still rings true today: in technology, you can’t stand still.Even during a time of economic hardship, IT needs to continuously look forward and innovate in ways that provide value to their business.
This delicate balancing act – keeping the lights on while continuing to look forward – is why it’s so important for IT leaders to be in total alignment with the business they’re supporting. Say, for example, you’re working in the insurance field. How does that insurance company turn a profit? What distinct value does the business offer; what problems do they solve in order to make money?
Everyone can answer these questions about their employer, of course, but IT leaders must strive to go beyond the surface-level details and learn the objectives of their business inside and out.
When IT leaders have a deep understanding of their business’s objectives, it becomes easier to make decisions around technology investments and understand how technology relates to business value.
Cloud-computing has changed the way we think about technology investments.
Decades ago, this balancing act was harder to get right – as investing in new technology meant major changes to IT infrastructure, changes that would be very difficult to reverse if an investment didn’t pan out as planned. As a result, IT had a tendency to over-buy in terms of capacity, often paying for more software and hardware than we needed.
Now, the rise and maturity of cloud-based solutions means we can increase or decrease capacity with the flick of a switch. This presents IT leaders with an opportunity to become more agile and efficient, an opportunity that was rarer back in 2008.
By leveraging cloud-based vendors and partnerships, we’re now able to be more flexible in times of economic downturns, expanding or contracting the scale of our investments so that they’re always in step with the current business demand.
Hiring costs: Developing talent from within IT departments is more important than ever.
It’s not just technology and the way we use it that has changed since the Great Recession – the responsibilities and required skills of IT workers have also evolved considerably. Companies are facing the costly proposition of hiring for new technology positions, looking for candidates who are qualified to perform jobs that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.
These companies are struggling with this challenge. There’s a major skills gap in the IT hiring market, as there are more open jobs than there are active candidates who boast the skills employers are looking for. As a result, we’re seeing an unprecedented number of open roles remain unfulfilled for months or even years.
This brings me to the second lesson I’ve learned in my long career in IT: it’s important to develop skills internally before looking externally. When looking to fill new roles, I’ve always started by looking at the people around me, seeing who could evolve from their current roles into new positions. Developing internal IT talent is essential today, given the skills gap in the current hiring market – and the huge overhead that hiring new staff represents in the first place.
Finding job candidates with skills in data analytics, automation, AI, and other new technology trends is not only difficult, but expensive. But if you were to bring someone up from within your organization desk and help them develop some of these skills, you end up accomplishing many goals at once:
You evolve your IT department into a unit that’s prepared for future workplace challenges.
You save the business a significant amount of hiring resources and money.
You give individual IT workers an actionable and more sustainable career path.
Throughout my own career, I was given the opportunity to develop my skill set and move up the ranks – so I believe it’s important to give back and allow others to do so as well.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, how well you navigate a recession as an IT leader depends on your ability to do more with less and be more efficient with what you have – it doesn’t require you to do less.
If there’s anything that previous recessions have taught us, it’s that IT can never afford to stand still. But when your technology and your IT employees are developing in alignment with your business’s objectives, you’ll be able to deliver value in any economic climate.
In today’s episode, we chat with Nancy Goebel, Deputy CEO at the Digital Workplace Group, about digital workspaces — a necessity in today’s world that demands more effort towards employee satisfaction and engagement.
But not everyone is comfortable with this shift from a traditional workspace. It’s why leaders must act as stewards of change if we’re to successfully transition into this new space.
We discuss:
DWG’s origin and the secret to building community.
The digital experience from an employee standpoint.
The uncertainty around the hybrid workspace.
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