Why Digital Experience Monitoring is a Strategic Move for IT Leaders

Since the shift to hybrid work, 60 percent of organizations are prioritizing the digital employee experience (DEX) to increase productivity and collaboration, attract and retain talent, reduce costs, and deliver better customer experiences (CX). What does this mean for IT leaders?   

First, the focus on DEX has expanded the role of IT departments. IT is not only managing devices and service desk tickets but they're being tapped by HR and business leaders to think more broadly and strategically about employees' digital experiences in the workplace. 

Second, DEX as a top priority has elevated IT leaders within organizations. While most leaders agree that HR and IT are currently equally responsible for the DEX, 45 percent of IT leaders expect to own their organization's DEX strategy in the next five years.

The evolution of IT as a strategic partner for employee experience and business success requires all levels to embrace data, from CIOs to IT directors to practitioners. Digital experience monitoring (DEM) solutions are crucial for transforming anecdotal feedback into actionable insights that enable IT leaders to take on their expanded and elevated roles with ease. 

Let's explore how DEM can help your organization.

What is digital experience monitoring (DEM)?

DEM combines real-time analytics, employee sentiment data and automated remediation to help IT leaders increase employee productivity, engagement and empowerment. It is a key component of an organization's overall DEX strategy. 

Many organizations are already collecting large amounts of raw, unfiltered data for some areas of the DEX. For example, point solutions like end-user experience monitoring (EUEM) and modern device management (MDM) platforms allow IT leaders to capture data from employees' applications and devices. These solutions are valuable and complement DEM tools. However, when used on their own, the data from these solutions is often incomplete and doesn't provide IT with a full view of how digital experiences are impacted. 

That's where DEM solutions are different. 

A true DEM solution provides a holistic view of the DEX. It leverages the data you're already gathering and closes the gaps where data is missing. Then it translates all that information into actionable insights that drive change, improve performance and create fresh experiences. 

What should you measure with DEM? 

Each organization will have different factors they want to measure based on their priorities and business goals. Generally, DEM consists of measuring these six key areas of the DEX:  

1. Employee sentiment data includes survey feedback, employee net promoter scores (eNPS), user satisfaction scores (CSAT), task completion rates, and application usage and adoption rates.
2. Application performance includes measuring application launch, system usage (memory, CPU, disk, network), network response times, page load times and key transaction completion rates. It also takes into consideration the current state of an organization's cloud or software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider.
3. Device performance includes monitoring device metrics including CPU, Memory, Disk, network performance and state, battery health, errors and event logs, and system inventory.
4. Connectivity includes measuring network status, WiFi strength, latency, packet loss and bandwidth utilization as well as per-application network statistics.
5. Security includes tracking successful threat detection rates, response times to security incidents, compliance with policy and data protection regulations, and the performance impact to logins and business-critical applications.
6. Operations/support includes monitoring incident response times, mean time to resolution (MTTR), support ticket volume and problem resolution rates, and self-service or automation utilization.

The benefits of DEM for IT leaders

The right DEM solution can positively impact all employee groups within an organization — from frontline workers to operations teams to C-suite executives. For IT leaders, specifically, DEM enables them to: 

• Proactively identify and resolve issues before they disrupt the employee experience.
• Optimize the DEX to increase employee productivity, engagement, satisfaction and retention.
• Drill down into specific persona experiences (e.g., frontline workers versus office-based workers versus remote workers) to create custom reporting dashboards.
• Make the right technology decisions faster based on data insights.
• Foster collaboration and alignment across IT teams and business leaders.

Leading DEM solutions and vendors

A quick online search of the top DEM tools will yield a long list of results, ranging from comprehensive DEM platforms to niche solutions. It can be overwhelming to determine what your organization needs and what it can operate without. 

We've narrowed the list for you by evaluating, testing, implementing and partnering with the top DEM vendors. Based on our experience, we recommend exploring these DEM vendors first: 

Experience management

• Nexthink
• Lakeside
• Riverbed Alluvio Aternity
• Aware
• Digital Employee Experience Management powered by Workspace ONE Intelligence (see side note)

Employee sentiment analysis

• Nexthink
• Lakeside
• Aware
• VMware

Network performance monitoring

• ThousandEyes
• Zscaler

Unified communications monitoring

• IR (formerly IR Prognosis)

Application performance monitoring

• AppDynamics
• Riverbed

While you won't need to implement all these tools, you probably won't find everything you need from a single vendor. We can help you evaluate DEM offerings based on your requirements and determine the right combination for your organization. 

Get started today

As the role of IT evolves and expands to include ownership of the DEX, an automated, data-driven approach to monitoring and optimizing experiences is crucial for maximizing operational efficiency and empowering employees.     

There are many DEM tools available today to help IT leaders monitor and improve the DEX. Choosing the right solution for your organization starts with developing a comprehensive strategy. We can help identify and align your organization's goals and objectives to specific metrics and DEM solutions so you can measure what matters and create a workplace where employees thrive. 

Glossary of key DEX and DEM terms

DEM and DEX are often misused interchangeably, creating confusion among IT leaders and their teams. Here's a glossary of popular keywords that should help you understand what to use when:

• Digital employee experience (DEX): Overarching term that refers to employees' interactions with workplace technology. DEX focuses on ensuring employees have the flexibility and convenience to seamlessly access any application, on any device, from any location.
• Digital experience monitoring (DEM): A key component of an organization's DEX strategy. DEM is how an organization tracks, monitors and measures the DEX to identify improvements.
• End-user experience monitoring (EUEM): The process of monitoring the performance of IT resources, including end-user devices and applications, from an employee's perspective. EUEM is more specific than DEM and is usually included in a DEM solution.
• Unified endpoint management (UEM) or modern device management (MDM): Allows IT teams to manage any application on any endpoint device — Windows desktops, Mac desktops, mobile phones, laptops, etc. — within a single tool.
• Employee monitoring: The use of workplace surveillance and productivity software to gather information about the activities and locations of employees.