Going Beyond "Have You Tried Unplugging It and Plugging It Back In?" Taking IT to the Clouds

The phrase “digital experience management” might seem like tech jargon at first glance, but odds are—you’ve experienced it in your everyday work-life without realizing it. Digital experience management, or DEM, is the process of optimizing the user experience of work endpoints. It ensures that every device and application used is available, functioning, and up-to-speed.

Focusing on DEM is a no-brainer, especially in the age of hybrid and remote work. Employees need digital experiences to be fast, flexible and updated at all times so they can do their work—and do it well. There really is nothing worse than twiddling your thumbs, waiting for an application to do its job, and wasting precious time during the workday.

In this new era of digital transformation, there isn’t really a good excuse for companies that claim they want to succeed but aren’t willing to invest in employees’ digital experiences. For one thing, employees who report high satisfaction in their company stay longer, which creates lower turnover rates and increases their ROI overall. This should seem obvious, but many organizations are lagging behind in this critically important workplace strategy.

Luckily, emerging technology is, once again, coming to the rescue.

Data, Data, and (You Guessed It)...More Data

It should come as no surprise that one of the keys to a better digital employee experience is…data. If you don’t know what issues your employees are having, how can you fix them? You can’t.

So how much data is necessary to ensure an excellent employee experience? Think of it this way: in our “new normal” of hybrid and remote work, employees are not sitting in office chairs from 9-5 pm. They’re dropping kids off at school, picking up groceries on the way home, and taking a break in the afternoon to run errands before rush hour. We’re no longer living in a 9-to-5 work mentality. Data procurement and analysis must adjust accordingly. This means implementing technologies that are capable of handling a 24/7 stream of information.

Companies that take this issue head-on will rise above the rest in terms of employee satisfaction and overall success. And, lucky for them, tech innovators are coming to the rescue. New cloud-based digital employee management software is entering the market to help employers monitor, quantify, and analyze end-user experience in order to reduce IT costs and increase productivity.

So how exactly does this work? The first step is to monitor anything and everything that could have an impact on the employee’s digital experience. One of these DEM software companies, Lakeside Software, offers a unique Digital Experience Cloud. Their product stores, monitors, and analyzes information, turning a plethora of data into succinct data points and insights on which IT managers can take action. The software prioritizes items that need to be fixed and automates the resolution of common or trending issues, reducing manual IT work. Through this constant, 24/7 data analysis, IT teams know if anything is off before the user even gets an “error” message.

Moving IT Into the Limelight

Updated, high-functioning technology is the modern worker’s basic need, and some would argue that it’s their basic right. Without operable tools, workers cannot work. That’s why IT and tech teams have become even more important to the workforce overall.

The digital experience isn’t about having fancy tech tools that don’t hold a lot of basic, everyday substance. Working in a remote or hybrid environment demands more. The digital experience demands functioning tech tools because the end-user will have no digital experience whatsoever if they cannot access tools at any time from anywhere in order to do their jobs. The power of DEM software lies in the high-functioning capacity to support employees no matter where they work. Our resources and tools must line up with the value of our new “work-from-anywhere” business model. IT is poised to expand at a global scale this year and into 2023, and businesses that push comprehensive IT systems into the forefront of their company are sure to see success.