What’s the value of employee engagement in the workplace? A staggering $8.8 trillion, according to Gallup. But why does this matter? Without adequate engagement, employees feel disconnected and isolated, directly affecting an organization’s productivity and profitability.
In fact, research also found that only 33% of employees feel engaged at work, and just 38% of those employees feel they have the materials and equipment they need to do their jobs. While trending upward compared to previous years, these numbers prove that organizations are struggling to engage employees, leading to larger problems that have a direct impact on productivity and profitability.
Despite these reports, not enough organizations see just how detrimental negative employee experiences, including the digital employee experience, can be to their business operations.
With a modern workforce reliant on hybrid and remote work environments, an organization’s strongest chance of combating employee engagement issues lies in maintaining the health of its IT environment, but IT teams cannot fix what they cannot see.
Exploring the dark estate
The dark estate, which includes all areas of a complex environment that are not visible to IT teams, encourages the growth of IT issues, leading to costly inefficiencies, sup-par digital employee experiences, unresolved problems, and poor performances across devices, networks, and applications. The current trend toward a distributed workforce is only making these problems worse, feeding off the uncertainties employees face without the physical presence of an IT team.
So, how can CIOs and IT leaders improve visibility and operational efficiency? By illuminating the dark estate with data. Not only will IT teams gain a clearer understanding of an organization’s IT assets, but they also will uncover performance and usage information to improve the overall digital employee experience and gain real-time and historic data to feed today’s AI models. With this deeper understanding, organizations can implement a proactive IT strategy to prevent technical problems from evolving into business disruptions.
Here’s how to shine a light on the dark estate with a proactive IT strategy.
Uncover hidden issues and understand their root causes
The dark estate is the enemy of the modern workplace. This is because IT issues are multi-layered. For every slow program, there is a handful of reasons behind the latency. Did we run out of storage? Are there too many users? When was the last time this software was updated? Is it something more sinister?
The lack of visibility in distributed work environments leaves IT teams with limited information, making it impossible to discover and analyze issues until they come up to the surface. But with accurate and complete endpoint data, IT teams suddenly gain insight to diagnose and treat the source of various issues and perform true root cause analysis. Through automated diagnostics, smart sensors, and AI-enabled capabilities, IT teams can triage issues based on historical and real-time data to evaluate severity.
Once understood, common issues that require little intervention can be managed by individual employees, while larger, more complex technical issues can receive additional attention and accelerated troubleshooting. By optimizing IT services at the employee level, IT teams treat the source of the problem rather than the symptoms.
With a proactive approach, organizations gain broader visibility, getting ahead of major problems to improve end-user productivity, successfully deploy new technology across the organization, and reduce overall IT involvement.
Implement smart fixes through AI, automation, and self-service
Metrics and data insights are critical to maintaining the health of an IT estate and implementing proactive IT. Data is the fuel for the most sophisticated AI models. This intelligence paints a picture of what’s happening across the IT environment and, when tracked consistently and in real-time, enables IT teams to identify and predict issues. With real-time data, IT teams can implement smart fixes through AI, automation, and self-service tools, proactively solving issues before they impact the end user.
Unlike the traditional break-fix approach, proactive IT means that IT teams no longer have to wait for an issue to happen to take action. Instead, organizations should consistently monitor their systems to gain an understanding of their standard IT status. This is useful in determining the severity of problems and identifying trends. If an employee feels that their internet is slow, is that an application error or a browser issue? Is something wrong with their connection, or is the slowdown company-wide? Do they require an update? Proactive IT helps answer these questions by providing IT teams with baseline information on common issues.
Armed with this information, IT teams can map out simple solutions that will empower employees to fix the issues on their own, reducing help desk tickets and improving overall productivity. IT teams can even reach out before an employee notices the issue and use conversational AI to issue alerts through applications like Teams or Slack. If issues persist, employees know they are facing a larger problem and can notify IT, create service tickets, and help IT teams identify patterns to prevent similar issues in the future.
Streamline IT operations while cutting expenses
Costly, unused software licenses also lie in the shadows of the dark estate. And just like the seemingly endless list of personal subscription services silently siphoning money away from unknowing members every month, a growing roster of business-minded applications, software licenses, and devices of the modern workplace make it easy to overlook which ones are actively being used by employees.
If the accounting department recently upgraded to a new, comprehensive system, do they still need licenses for their old invoicing software? Does everyone in the marketing department need access to Adobe? Can two project management programs be combined into one solution that does it all?
While proactive IT uses automation to help IT teams identify lagging systems and login issues, the endpoint data it’s built on also gives insight into device lifecycles, necessary software update timelines, and overall usage to identify redundancies and fill gaps. Through a proactive approach, organizations are constantly aware of device health, performance, and usage, allowing them to anticipate and prevent downtime caused by issues or unnecessary costs related to updates and device replacements.
But proactive IT doesn’t just manage resources. It unlocks an organization’s capabilities to explore the hidden complexities lurking within IT environments. IT visibility empowers IT teams to optimize software management, identify the root causes behind a wide range of issues, and lean on data to improve the digital employee experience, enhancing an organization’s profitability, productivity, and engagement in the process.
