Nexthink stresses the need for fostering positive employee experiences to successfully meet business objectives during Digital Transformation projects. Intelligent CIO meets Maged Eid, Area VP – META, Nexthink, to find out more.
Nexthink, a global leader in Digital Employee Experience Management, encourages organisations to understand employees’ experiences during Digital Transformation projects to achieve business objectives and avoid costly project failures.
The company believes organisations need to change culture by involving employees when planning their IT strategy. It says failing to do so can result in poor IT experiences that can impact on a businesses’ bottom line.
It argues that it is crucial for companies to recognise how important employees’ experiences are to their overall business – as happy, motivated employees allow companies to innovate and deliver on key objectives.
Nexthink has argued for the need for employees to be placed at the forefront of an IT strategy and has showcased its ‘Digital Experience Score,’ which combines hard data and employee feedback for organisations to continuously measure, benchmark (against peers and competitors) and improve digital employee experience with a defined set of metrics.
“Many new technology initiatives fail because employees aren’t involved in the strategy phase – this is because IT departments do not have a good enough understanding of what’s needed for employees to do their jobs,” said Maged Eid, Area VP – META, Nexthink. “Nexthink’s technology provides real-time visibility and insights that enables an organisation’s IT department to take a proactive approach to improving its IT performance and resolving potential problems quickly. This helps foster a positive employee experience and boost productivity.”
Intelligent CIO spoke to Eid to find out more about the company’s activities.
Can you explain what the company does?
We manage the digital experience of the end-user. The general concept is IT invests a lot in the back -end infrastructure but they don’t know about the experience of the end-user.
We don’t know whether we are giving the right attention to the end-user or not. Our role as a technology leader is to be with every single user on his workstation gathering all the necessary information to come up with a score to understand if they are satisfied.
We manage the most valuable elements of any organisation in the world, which is basically the end-user and the data. So, they are the most valuable assets, not anything else, not the servers, not the storage, not the routers, it’s the user who is using the infrastructure and the data that he is generating or using within the organisation itself.
So we are there, looking after the data, looking after the end-user, to make sure that the user is connected to the right server at the right time. We share this information, even the sensitive information of the user himself in real time so we can take the right decision on the spot. We will not wait for the end-user to complain about something, and then later on find a solution. We work in a proactive way instead of firefighting.
So what you are really doing is enhancing business efficiency?
Absolutely because what is happening with companies that do not use Nexthink is that they wait for the users to complain and usually they will not complain. They will try to figure it out themselves, because when you look to the Millennials they are coming from technology backgrounds, so they will believe that they are much smarter than IT. They will not waste their time, opening the tickets, waiting for the IT team to sort it out for them. They will try to sort it out themselves and the easiest solution is to reboot.
And it might be a solution, because it’s an instant relief for certain issues, but it doesn’t reach out to the root cause itself. This is something we do as well so we detect exactly what is happening, which user is using which application, which port, which server. We measure more than 800 metrics to understand exactly what is happening around the user and the services.
Moreover, we introduced two modules, one of them called Acts, which can take automatic actions for certain scenarios.
For example, if there is a case happening with one of the users like a performance issue Nexthink will detect that this machine or user or service is running in a low performance mode. We will open the ticket automatically. We will send an alert to the team, we will put out the information about the main reason for the issue.
In many cases we tell IT what the issue is, for example, wrong configuration or connection to the wrong code or compliance issue. Then we can fix it automatically without any intervention from IT. Once it’s fixed, we close the tickets, and it’s done.
Moreover, the other module which is Engage, sees us engaging with the end-user. So we will inform the user that we knew that they experienced a performance issue. We will tell them: ‘The problem has been sorted out, please acknowledge or rate your experience with IT.’ This gives us the opportunity to make the end-user part of the decision-making cycle. Because if this does not happen end-users will come back later on saying ‘I don’t like the new technology, it’s not performing well’. It’s a typical human nature response as they were not part of the decision-making process.
We can use Engage for awareness campaigns, for example, related to security, related to human resources and related to government initiatives. We’ve used it for many customers, we use it, for example, internally with IT. We use it to improve the government services which are aligned with Dubai’s strategy.
We can also use Engage for green initiatives such as the importance of shutting down your machines before leaving the office. So we promote these kind of engagement campaigns, aligned to the organisation’s objectives and the country’s objectives as well.
What are the main requirements of your customers?
We give IT more visibility and insights about the user’s sentiment and about the performance of the machine, the applications, the services, the availability and so on and so forth.
They use our results to take key decisions. In many cases they are strategic decisions to answer questions such as ‘Are we using the right technology?’
What are the benefits of the insights you give to customers?
They ask questions like: ‘Do we have to upgrade existing platforms for example? Do we have to run different kinds of awareness campaigns?’ So it’s all related to vital strategic decisions for the organisation, and it’s not only about the technical findings because it goes far beyond that, it goes into the roadmap of IT within the organisation itself, what kind of technologies they have to invest in, and so on and so forth.
Would you help companies with their decision making in terms of IT?
Absolutely. We help organisations to utilise the existing technology in the right way, because in many cases they have the technology in place, but it’s not properly configured. It’s not fine-tuned towards the infrastructure performance. It’s not necessarily that the latest release from certain vendors is the best one, because maybe it will exhaust a customer’s infrastructure. They have to know and understand exactly which release is the perfect fit for their existing infrastructure.
How do you provide Real Time visibility to your customers?
We have collectors at every single end-point and the collector is doing one single job, which is collecting all the activities, all the behaviours, from users’ applications, sending it to the engine of Nexthink in real time.
The moment we have it we will start visualising exactly what is happening on every single machine and on the entire infrastructure. For example, if I have 5000 endpoints, 5000 users, they have 5000 eyes within the organisation, telling me exactly what is happening, but we don’t touch the user data for privacy.
In terms of in terms of making the employee experience more positive, what impact does that have on productivity?
I think we exceed the expectations of IT and the end-users. Because today if the end-user is experiencing some performance issues or a slowness issue or a security issue, in many cases they will not report it to IT.
They will try to fix it themselves which is a big waste of time for them. And it will be a huge drop in their productivity, which is the main ROI for the organisation as they hired those people. In order to achieve certain goals, and the higher the profile, the higher the loss.
We are proactive as an IT organisation. We know exactly what is happening, ahead of time and before even there is a complaint about it. We will fix it on the spot so we will save the customer’s time that they waste on all the problems they are suffering from.
I think when it comes to productivity and efficiency, we can measure it, we can see whether their users are happy with the existing system or not. We can see if the users are adapting the new technology and using it in a proper way or not because we can see the productivity levels from the end-user side. When it comes to productivity, efficiency is one of the key goals that we measure in our projects when we deliver to the customers.
