by: VMware Information Systems Senior Engineer Russell Ahmed; VMware Information Systems Manager Dan Sanford; VMware Product Line Manager Amit Sharma; VMware Product Line Marketing Manager Maya Shiran; and VMware Senior Information Systems Engineer Cy Whitfield
The transition to a digital employee experience—how users interact with digital enterprise tools—is a mission-critical initiative for companies in every industry. The shift to remote work further accelerates this transition thanks to its dramatic impact on how IT organizations operate, a fact made clearer by the effects of the pandemic, which caught many enterprises off guard.
While remote work offers tremendous benefits, such as flexible workstyles, it comes with significant challenges. For instance, the quantity of apps available is exploding, and the various combinations of devices and OS platforms/editions is almost unmanageable, especially with the increasing number of bring-your-own-device initiatives. Adding salt to the wound is the fact IT often lacks visibility into these components.
Figure 1. Example of the traditional experience users encounter with an issue.
A bad reaction
Traditionally, IT organizations operate in a reactive mode. Employees encounter an issue, open a ticket, and wait for IT to solve it.
Existing IT systems can only do so much to mitigate help desk issues, with the result often involving reactive issue detection, inefficient troubleshooting, and slow remediation. Resolutions typically involve manual root cause analysis (RCA) that is time consuming and not always possible. Additionally, system insight is hindered as usage data is hard to obtain. Data consolidation—which generally requires additional tools to complete—is likewise time consuming and involves special knowledge, as well as manual labor.
Everyone demanded a new solution. Boy, did we find one!
In order to mitigate these challenges—as well as meet the relentless demands of internal and external market drivers—VMware IT deployed our Digital Employee Experience Management (DEEM) solution powered by VMware Workspace ONE® Intelligence™. DEEM allows unparalleled visibility into the global colleague experience via advanced analytics.
Figure 2. DEEM provides comprehensive data gathering to ensure a superior colleague experience.
It tracks workplace key performance indicators impacting the digital colleague experience across desktop and mobile devices. The system also allows our teams to automate existing IT processes involving issue discovery, RCA, and remediation. In many cases, issues are resolved before a colleague is even aware a problem has occurred.
Score one for the team
It starts with developing a user experience score. This is accomplished by aggregating device, OS, app, and user activity data coming from multiple sources across the IT environment. The information is then used to calculate ‘fluid’ consolidated user, app, and device experience scores that can be continuously updated based on tracked changes and anomalies.
DEEM data is accessed via out-of-the-box dashboards and reports that generate real-time visibility. In fact, team members can generate simplified reports and dashboards on-the-fly for management presentations and similar ‘lay person’ requirements. Additionally, teams can realize granular information by drilling down on a specific user score or app, a feature that enables seamless RCA. The system also allows for highly customizable alerts and notifications, as well as predefined triggers and remediation workflows enhanced by user-centric automation.
Real-world results translate to real-world savings
Since its deployment, the DEEM system has delivered a remarkable return on investment on several levels.
It’s easy to calculate the savings from reduced number of help desk tickets or the hours IT spends on each ticket. In addition, because there are costs associated with unhappy colleagues, such as disengagement and turnover, the system’s comprehensive data management enables team members to assign actual monetary values to even the most esoteric metric, such as colleague happiness. And this impacts the business bottom line.
Overall, DEEM makes the enterprise more efficient and offers a true advantage in attracting and keeping the best talent globally, throughout the entire corporate ecosystem.
VMware on VMware blogs are written by IT subject matter experts sharing stories about our digital transformation using VMware products and services in a global production environment. Contact your sales rep or [email protected] to schedule a briefing on this topic. Visit the VMware on VMware microsite and follow us on Twitter.
