Best Practices for Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Tool Deployment

An Interview with ControlUp Field CTO, Simon Townsend

According to Gartner®, “By 2025, 50% of IT organizations will have established a DEX strategy, team, and management tool, up from less than 20% in 2023.” “Demand for [digital employee experience] (DEX) tools is accelerating as organizations place more emphasis on ways to continuously improve their DEX to help retain and attract top talent. Unfortunately, organizations that have deployed DEX tools often struggle to fully leverage their investment.¹”

Download your complimentary copy of the Gartner “How to Successfully Deploy a DEX Tool” report

I recently sat down with ControlUp Field CTO, Simon Townsend to talk about his experience helping organizations navigate their DEX tool rollouts and use case expansions. Simon shared tips and tricks from his work with ControlUp customers to explain why some organizations realize the wide-ranging benefits of DEX tools, while some fall short.

Why are organizations looking at digital employee experience (DEX) tools in the first place?

Digital employee experience (DEX) tools have wide-ranging benefits – and not just for IT. Overall, IT organizations can realize significant time and cost savings. These are achieved through features that address common challenges, like reducing support tickets and time to resolution, reducing IT overhead through automation, and improving security through patch compliance and visibility.

However, end users also benefit from these improvements. Reduced tickets and support time means that users can stay productive and in the flow of their work all day long. They can work effectively from any desktop, any app, anywhere, and at any time. And the whole company benefits from improved employee retention and the ability to attract top talent.

What can organizations achieve with DEX solutions?

DEX tools help organizations achieve their strategic imperatives in several key ways. First, DEX tools can help lower IT costs per employee. IT can right-size VDI (on-prem) and DaaS (cloud) environments, paying for only what they need. It’s also easy to eliminate unused and redundant software licenses across the estate. DEX tools can also facilitate sustainability initiatives by helping IT move to an experience and performance-based refresh cycle, rather than device age. And more recently help IT understand which devices don’t need replacing for Windows 11, (saving around 200kg C02e per device that can be repurposed).

DEX tools also allow IT organizations to be more human-centric, autonomous, and proactive. These features empower IT and free up resources to focus on the top-level strategic imperatives that keep them ahead of the curve.

What are the best practices for deploying DEX?

When I see customers who are extremely successful in their DEX tool deployments, they often have a couple of things in common:

First, they clearly define their objectives at the beginning of the process – and those objectives align with business goals. For instance, DEX tools are very effective at lowering IT cost per employee and reducing mean time to resolutions. IT organizations that are under pressure to reduce costs while also improving employee experience will quickly realize the ROI of DEX tool.

Second, cross-functional stakeholders should be involved early and frequently. This helps with change management and driving tool adoption. Some important stakeholders include security and compliance teams, HR, IT, and executive leadership. This will ensure the tool’s capabilities, key features, and prioritized use cases align with business objectives and get broad support.

The one item I see and talk about most often, however, is the deployment of a DEX tool to IT support and the day-to-day use of the DEX solution. Many organizations see DEX as a monitoring tool used by managers and senior IT people to measure historical performance and understand the experience. While important, a real DEX solution should not just ‘collect the data’ and ‘connect the dots’ but also allow IT to ‘correct the course.’ The most successful deployments I see include those who utilize DEX for remediation and allow first-, second-, and third-line engineers access to the DEX platform, allowing them to carry out remediation.

I highly recommend that anyone who wants to learn about more best practices read the Gartner report “How to Successfully Deploy a DEX Tool”.

Who needs to be involved?

As I mentioned, involving key stakeholders early in the process is critical to a successful DEX tool deployment. This helps drive overall buy-in, use case prioritization, and adoption. Some key stakeholders that I suggest involving are first and foremost the IT teams that will be using the tools, as well as HR and corporate comms. Additionally, security and compliance teams should be involved to ensure that tools meet – and ideally, enhance – their policies. As the digital workplace strategy becomes more mature, it will be key to involve change management teams, finance, and ESG.

What are some of the key integrations with DEX platform?

DEX tools alone can provide tremendous insights into any environment and as mentioned, should provide the business with both manual and automated remediation capabilities in addition to the collection of data. DEX integrations further enhance the value of a DEX solution, either increasing the data points and telemetry the platform can gather and/or enhancing the operational remediation capabilities.

Key integrations for data collection, for example, should include VDI/DaaS workspaces and unified communications. Utilizing connectors, API calls, and agentless technologies increases the number of data points and telemetry a DEX platform can collect. The benefits of such integrations mean that IT can see into hypervisors, cloud services, Azure subscriptions, Zoom and Teams calls, and more. Other integrations should include IT Service Management (ITSM) tools such as ServiceNow and unified endpoint tools (UEM) such as Microsoft Intune. These integrations allow for automated incidents to be raised and tracked and can ensure that telemetry can power change in the UEM tool. Integrations can also offer IT admins a single pane of glass, combining DEX metrics with the native ITSM or UEM consoles.

What are some of the reasons a DEX deployment might fail?

There are myriad reasons why DEX tool deployments might fail, and it’s often a combination of several factors. However, the top three reasons for failure are:

Failure to get buy-in from key stakeholders.
Focusing only on technology and only on one platform. DEX is for every workspace and employee surveys and engagement are just as important as device telemetry.
Not deploying the DEX tool across the IT business and employees. DEX is not just for one or two people that need reports. DEX should be owned by a few but utilized by many.

What is the best way for organizations to demonstrate the ROI of DEX tools now and in the future?

DEX tools can reduce support costs, reduce tickets, and remove the negative impact support issues create for employee productivity. Through alerting, triggers, and automation, organizations can show ROI and demonstrate total cost of ownership (TCO) by focusing on these areas. However, DEX tools also offer several capabilities that can help reduce the cost and complexity of IT tools that are already in use. DEX platforms can provide remote control capabilities, patching solutions, vulnerability assessment, software asset management, and more. Organizations can easily realize the savings that DEX can bring through technology consolidation, and reducing the cost and complexity of tools. DEX tools can also help IT track endpoint health and optimize migrations to the cloud, which both can help reduce the cost associated with endpoint acquisition and cloud services.

Where should people start?

I suggest IT teams start by getting clear on their objectives. What are you hoping to achieve with a DEX tool? How will this help your organization? Consider what workspace projects are coming up? Are you moving to Windows 11? Are you moving VDI to DaaS? Do you need to consolidate IT tools or rationalize application software costs? All of these could benefit from utilizing a DEX platform.

Next, ensure that your objectives are aligned across the organization, that you have support from executive leadership, and assess your organization’s cultural readiness.

You should also start educating yourself on what DEX tools can do and how they can help. Our ControlUp blog has a lot of great content around this!

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Notices and Disclaimers

Gartner, How to Successfully Deploy a DEX Tool, By Dan Wilson, Autumn Stanish, Tom Cipolla, Stuart Downes, Rich Doheny, Mrudula Bangera, 3 April 2023