Companies must constantly evolve to stay competitive, but with that progress comes challenges.
Hidden within complex IT systems is the “dark estate”—areas unknown or overlooked by IT teams.
Employees reportedly feel they are only performing at 60% of their productivity capacity, while 22% of employees believe the right technology and support can increase their productivity. It’s clear that these unseen IT issues not only hinder productivity but also impact the overall digital employee experience (DEX).
All of this can directly lead to one of the most costly problems for an organization, and one close to the heart of HR professionals – employee turnover. Lakeside found that nearly 40% of employees stated considering leaving their employer because of technology issues. The great news is that this is all within the organizations control!
By improving visibility across the entire IT estate, organizations can manage costly inefficiencies, overcome poor employee experiences, and resolve tech problems.
Understanding the Dark Estate
The dark estate encompasses all areas of a complex IT environment that are invisible or not obvious to IT teams. This lack of visibility has a major impact on an organization’s profitability, productivity, and engagement, hiding issues with device, network, or application performance. When left in the shadows, organizations face costly inefficiencies, poor DEX, and unresolved problems that can lead to more significant issues.
By shining a light across the entire IT environment, organizations can uncover hidden issues and understand their root causes, implement smart fixes through AI-enabled automation and self-service, and streamline IT operations while cutting expenses.
The Challenges of Delivering a Strong DEX
The dark estate and DEX are directly related. In fact, lack of visibility in an IT estate can negatively impact the quality of employee interactions with the technology needed to perform their jobs. Individual employees experiencing the occasional glitch, latency, or connectivity issue might seem minor compared to hacks or company-wide outages, but they contribute to frustrations, increased downtime, and reduced productivity over time.
Some of the most common issues impacting DEX are:
Unreported Issues
In today’s remote and hybrid work environments, employees and IT teams must work together to overcome issues. This requires employees to understand the importance of flagging any issue to IT, even if it seems small. Unfortunately, too often employees try to fix issues themselves or just suffer in silence.
Employees are also often resistant to virtually opening windows into their home networks to give IT teams a better understanding of the issues. It can be difficult to balance the access and control IT teams can have over an employee’s digital workplace.
Root Cause
Additionally, messages can get lost in the remote work environment. Often, service tickets include short notes to briefly describe an issue, leaving out critical information needed to diagnose and resolve issues. When the employee is asked to replicate the issue, it doesn’t always result in the same problem. Without visibility into the full picture, IT teams can’t accurately identify and resolve the true root cause and instead can sometimes just treat the symptoms.
Change fatigue
Updating software and hardware is necessary to maintain security and IT health, but working through too many changes can result in a wary workforce. In recent years, updates went from isolated, semi-regular occurrences rolled out in small batches to a rapid change environment with frequent, major, company-wide updates across every application, device, and program.
Illumination Through IT
All of these challenges can be solved with one thing: visibility. A successful IT team requires visibility over an organization’s entire estate. When organizations have the accurate, real-time data on endpoint health, performance, and usage, they can gain a better view of what’s really hiding in their dark estate. Finally, IT teams can see unreported issues, have confidence in their root cause analysis, and address change fatigue by implementing a digital transformation strategy that prioritizes the DEX.
Adopting a proactive IT approach
The right data can reveal an organization’s hidden issues, providing insight into root causes so that IT teams can shift from a reactive IT stance to a proactive one. With a proactive approach, IT teams see a reduction in service tickets and employees avoid costly downtime and unnecessary frustrations caused by workplace technologies. With insights from across the estate, IT teams suddenly have clarity on the far-reaching impact on issues. In a reactive approach, IT would not be alerted to a wide-spread issue until multiple IT tickets were submitted. Now, with one – or even zero – IT tickets, they can see a problem that may be impacting other employees. When IT teams are aware of these issues, they can resolve them before they spread to other employees.
Deploying a digital transformation strategy
Understanding the impacts of digital transformation on employees is critical to evaluating performance and employee reception. Visibility in digital transformation includes comparing old applications, systems, and software with new ones to determine benefits and quantify the right number of licenses needed.
Digital transformation also provides organizations with increased opportunities to implement automation features that streamline IT operations, provide smart fixes, and enable self-service to cut expenses and minimize time spent on smaller IT issues. Automation can even track employee satisfaction.
Monitoring a constantly changing IT estate
New releases, patches, and software updates are necessary to maintain security, business continuity, and relevance in any industry. But each of these variables contributes to the rapid pace of change impacting DEX. Leaning on data will enable IT teams to monitor and manage these changes in real time to determine the effects on end users, making adjustments where necessary.
Data empowers IT to manage the constant changes happening across a modern digital workplace. And data visibility drives DEX, directly impacting an organization’s profitability, productivity, and engagement. From cutting costs and minimizing downtime to automating maintenance and increasing engagement, digital transformation is a driving force for improving the digital employee experience and enabling IT teams to make intelligent, data-driven decisions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew McGuire
VP of Product Engineering
With nearly 20 years of experience, Matthew McGuire is VP of Product Engineering at Lakeside Software, where he leads product development and innovation. Matt works closely with customers, prospects, and internal stakeholders to continue to evolve Lakeside’s solutions to meet market needs. Prior to joining Lakeside, Matt led product management teams at SwagUp and HealthcareSource. He has a B.A. from the University of Buffalo and an MBA from the University of Albany.