Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 39 | Page 31

N exthink, 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 www.intelligentcio.com 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 “ MANY NEW TECHNOLOGY INITIATIVES FAIL BECAUSE EMPLOYEES AREN’T INVOLVED IN THE STRATEGY PHASE. “ business ‘‘ TALKING IT INVESTS A LOT IN THE BACK END INFRASTRUCTURE BUT THEY DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF THE END-USER. 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- INTELLIGENTCIO 31