Reshaping employee experience: In search of the data-driven digital workplace
CIOs across the globe are investing millions of dollars on tools and process engineering towards implementing digital workplace solutions. Many of these initiatives have downstream aspirations such as a zero-contact service desk. Worldwide IT service desk spending is projected to grow $6 billion by 2032, and CIOs want to find ways to minimize their investment on IT service desks while elevating the employee experience.
A data-driven digital workplace places data at the heart of operations and decision-making. Theoretically, it leverages technology to collect, analyze and interpret data from various sources, such as customer interactions, device telemetry, application performance and industry trends.
This data is then (magically) converted into insights and wisdom which can be used to optimize processes, improve efficiency and drive innovation. By making data-informed decisions, leaders can avoid personal biases in the decision-making process, enhance customer satisfaction, increase productivity and gain a competitive edge in the digital age.
However, achieving a data-driven digital workplace is easier said than done. There is a misconception that more data is always better. Many IT leaders assume that accumulating vast amounts of data will automatically lead to better outcomes. Working on this assumption overwhelms organizations with vast amounts of data and can lead to huge costs, analysis paralysis and decreased efficiency.
Many leaders assume that collecting more data will lead to better outcomes, but a lack of data governance can result in huge costs, analysis paralysis and decreased efficiency.
Establishing the right mindset for data-driven employee experience
While collecting data and implementing technology around that data is important, it requires human expertise and strong functional processes to implement. It needs attention to data quality governance and interpretation to generate actionable insights, which supports CIOs to achieve the goal of creating a data-driven digital workplace.
Once your organization is set on the path of achieving a true data-driven digital workplace, you can start realizing numerous benefits in IT operations and leadership:
- Enhanced Decision-Making: The data-driven digital workplace enables access to up-to-date employee digital experience data and provides near real-time analytics to operational and tactical decision makers. This allows faster mobilization of resources to where they are needed, enabling efficient capacity planning and allocating investments to the right opportunities.
- Increased Innovation: The insights, trends and potential wisdom generated through the data-driven workplace lead to the discovery of new opportunities to improve employee experience. They also reduce or eliminate waste and non-value add (NVA) from existing IT processes, optimizing your overall IT operations.
- Improved Risk Management and Compliance: Analyzing the data collected from various sources allows IT teams to identify compliance issues and potential risk areas. These normally slip through the gaps when processed with only manual control points or sample data sets.
Achieving a data-driven workplace is not a one-time transformation project. Organizations that begin with this mindset are usually met with disappointing or underwhelming results. Instead, the implementation and operation of a data-driven workplace should be thought of as a continual process like a Deming Cycle (plan, do, study, act). Incremental updates of data ingestion, data analytics and action governance are applied into overall IT operations and governance. The secret sauce is an “agile” mindset.
Most IT organizations today are already running with optimized staffing and utilize single or multi-supplier outsourcing models for most of their operational functions. So, it becomes much more obvious that their ambition for a data-driven digital workplace must be supported (implemented and executed) by an experienced partner.
How to move towards a data-driven workplace
For an organization beginning this journey in this direction, the logical first step is to start by implementing end-user computer analytics. The data provided expands the organization’s vision about digital experience issues beyond the tickets reported at service desk. It is also a key enabler of proactive and preventive automation, enabling organizations to solve issues before they impact the end user.
The key benefit that organizations achieve with end-user computing analytics is the ability to measure the overall digital experience of their employees. This digital experience score, informs improvement initiatives designed to boost the digital employee experience (DEX). Our partner Nexthink provides an award-winning DEX platform that enables enterprises to quantify and improve digital employee experience.
The next milestone on this journey is for IT organizations is to implement workplace analytics capabilities, which analyze and correlate employee experience touchpoint data from multiple sources. These include device telemetry, ITSM systems (ServiceNow, Remedy, etc.), chatbots, IVR systems, surveys (Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, etc.), distribution systems (Intune, SCCM, etc.) and other data sources.
The final milestone on this journey is when your IT organization develops the capability for real-time observation and prediction of employee experience issues. This is a big leap, ingesting experience data in real time from multiple data sources, enriching the raw data and generating events of interest support teams to action and remediate.
Put data to work for your digital workplace today
Above, we have discussed how organizations can get started with their data-driven digital workplace journey. At Atos, we can put these steps into action for you, with proven services used by more than 25 global enterprises to support more than 1.2 million PCs. The Atos Experience Operations Center (XOC) is a state-of-the-art service that combines a state-of-the-art technology stack with proven processes and procedures, and a 24x7 eyes on glass team.
Get in touch with our team to learn how Atos services can improve the digital experience for your employees.
Posted on: November 20, 2024
Neil Stokes
Digital Workplace Experience Offering Manager
Member, Atos Research Community
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