A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.

Executive Director of International Commercial Services for IDG

The Experience Evolution Is Paving the Way for Digital Transformation Strategies

Today, when it comes to IT, user experience is king. As the world turned to remote work, companies had to reassess their IT infrastructures so that their employees could easily use and access their technology and networks from anywhere. However, if it was a cumbersome process that hindered productivity and offered a poor user experience, the whole exercise became counterproductive. So just like digital transformation accelerated over the last year, so did a fairly new practice in the industry called Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) which centers around assessing the performance, ease of use and efficacy of the IT infrastructure in place.

As a tool in an IT managers arsenal, DEM solutions are helping them understand and improve the employee experience with the digital ecosystem with which they interact. There are a range of tools available that fall into this category, but the ones that incorporate modernized technology such as machine learning, analytics and AI have really found a place in this distributed workforce landscape. One such example is the application of AI machine and deep-learning predictive analytics techniques. Through these, as well as robust analytics that generate device, application, network and overall IT ecosystem health insights, IT leaders are gaining a holistic view of their remote teams’ digital experience. This enables companies to better understand and therefore improve employee performance and provide a quality experience. With a tool like this in place, IT managers are better positioned to proactively identify and detect common PC issues before they impact the user’s experience.

The experience evolution

Prior to the pandemic, many organizations were not placing a big enough importance on digital experience, especially for remote workers. In fact, in a study conducted before the pandemic, 79% of remote workers agreed that they had to be their own IT person while working from home (Techaisle/Lenovo study Sept 2019). However, when an entire workforce switches from on-premise to remote, companies have to address their support and maintenance structure so that the at-home user experience mimics what it would be in the office. This is no easy feat and many companies struggled to do so.

According to Lenovo’s future of work study that was conducted in March 2021, about a year into the pandemic, almost half the employees in medium-sized businesses and 42 percent of small or very small businesses reported delays or challenges in getting any kind of IT support when needed while working remotely. That’s because IT teams had to suddenly shift from spending nearly 77% of their time on employee maintenance and support issues (Techaisle/Lenovo in Sept 2019), to instead focusing on data security, accelerating their move to manage their IT infrastructure from the cloud, and finding new ways to automate the identification and remediation of common, sometimes systemic, issues that were impacting their user’s productivity.

This is the very reason that many companies turned to reliable technology partners to help them maneuver this new landscape. Not only could external service providers manage a company’s technology support function, freeing their IT teams to focus more on other strategic and transformation functions, but they could also introduce new automation tools like DEM solutions. Such tools can help IT teams get better visibility into what’s happening across their PC fleets, keep up with the volume of problems diagnosed and offer seamless solutions that prevent interruption to employee productivity, uptime, and a positive user experience.

The increasing need for DEM solutions

At the core of the DEM solution category is consistency. Through the use of DEM solutions, IT teams have a more comprehensive, holistic view into device use and are able to provide a more consistent level of support for their employees. The benefits of this are tangible. Specifically around proactive/preventive support technologies, IDC found in their March 2020 Cost of Downtime Survey that almost 70% of the respondents who reported using such solutions, saved an average of 201 downtime hours per year. To put it in a different perspective, a data-driven business approach like leveraging predictive maintenance within DEM tools can help save 10-40% in IT maintenance costs and result in a 30-50% reduction in total device downtime (McKinsey).

Ultimately, leveraging DEM solutions improves the end-user experience by giving employees confidence in their devices and IT teams visibility into fleets while generating cost savings with fewer productivity interruptions. Common failures spanning both hardware and software issues — even if only in a small percentage of devices – cost employers time, money and resources which takes away from an organization’s profitability. For this reason, DEM solutions should now be considered a strategic part of an organizations’ digital transformation journey.

How can DEM solutions benefit your organization?

At Lenovo, we conducted research to better understand the benefits of our own DEM tools, Lenovo Device Intelligence and Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus, uncovering that enterprises can experience an estimated $3.2 million in annual ROI through the optimization of hardware and software assets. The use of DEM solutions can also equate to additional savings of up to $186K in annual service desk improvements and end-users can save up to 95 hours of time per year, making it a win/win for both companies and employees.

DEM tools also give companies a way to quantify improvements in their efforts to improve the end- user experience. They can help organizations create a baseline of top factors influencing end-user productivity. Such tools even have the ability to recommend how to address key areas and then provide trend analyses to track improvements.

Another benefit DEM solutions that utilize predictive analytics can provide is the ability to uncover problematic behaviors across the fleet that oftentimes go unreported by end users until the situation becomes critical. By removing such traditional IT blind spots and offering key insights and recommendations pre-emptively, IT teams are better equipped to address issues in a timely manner to keep employees up-and-running while increasing their overall satisfaction.

The future of the experience evolution

Leveraging emerging technologies like DEM solutions which use AI techniques and advanced predictive analytics combined with other robust fleet insights will drive transformational change. In fact, by 2023, 30% of large enterprises will exclusively be using AI and DEM technologies to monitor the non-legacy segments of their IT fleets, up from 2 percent in 2018 according to Gartner (Gartner, Sept 2019).

Although the new remote work environment has presented many new challenges, it has also provided companies with unique opportunities, which is why many are increasingly tapping into new capabilities to better serve their employee base and drive business efficiencies.

The choice is clear – If companies want to decrease organizational downtime, provide effective support for end-users, reduce infrastructure costs and maximize employee productivity, one area they can put their trust into is Digital Experience Monitoring to revolutionize and future-proof their business.

The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.