There’s a lack of visibility into the IT supply chain and it’s at the root of many challenges related to the digital workplace. However, there is a method that does offer the desired level of insight - Digital Employee eXperience (DEX). What exactly is it and how is it measured? In this blog, we'll take a closer look at the DEX score.
Today’s optimal digital workplace is a platform that enables almost all of the tasks necessary within a company. As a result, work is increasingly independent of time and place. However, virtualization, cloud computing and mobility have made the workplace so complex that it’s become increasingly difficult for IT to manage it properly. Moreover, employees are facing a growing number of obstacles.
What is it?
These bottlenecks are detailed in our new white paper. In a nutshell, the common thread in all these challenges is a lack of insight over the entire IT chain that a digital workplace is connected to. However, there is a method that does offer the desired level of insight, namely Digital Employee eXperience (DEX) scoring.
DEX scoring measures employees’ digital experiences in the workplace. It considers the entire application chain, as measured in the workplace. This gives insight on the actual use and performance of the digital workplace, network performance and - if applicable - cloud provider performance.
Components of the DEX
One software solution for Digital Employee eXperience scoring is Nexthink. This software offers IT departments complete control over the digital workplace. It does so by providing both a live and historical view of all employee endpoints, applications and digital workplace activities. Our white paper discusses this solution in detail.
In Nexthink, the DEX score is reported as a result between 0 and 10, making the status clear at a glance. That number is made up of a number of components, namely:
- The performance of computers, i.e. laptops, desktops and terminal servers. Measured in terms of processor or memory usage, application crashes and application hangs.
- Business application performance (apart from Microsoft solutions). This includes both executables and web applications. With executables, it checks the frequency of crashes, memory usage, processor usage and network usage. For web applications, it checks browser application crashes, network latency, and the duration of web requests.
- Microsoft Office performance. That includes both Office on-premises and Office365, as well as applications like Outlook and Teams. Network and processor behavior are included, as is memory usage.
- The presence and quality of digital security. This looks at whether solutions like antivirus or a firewall are running. Updates to this software are another point of attention.
- Optional: end users are questioned on their subjective experience of the workplace.
- As part of the collaboration with Ymor, Nexthink can also deploy chain monitoring. In this way, end user actions can be simulated or measured in real-time.
- DEX insights form a compass, which the IT organization can use to chart a course for improvement. For example, does the DEX index vary for different locations? Is the login response time for application X increasing? Such insights give the IT manager an opportunity to be proactive in preventing incidents or minimizing their impact.
