Have you ever struggled with a lagging Teams call or a slow Outlook experience? You’re not alone. Only half (53%) of staff believe their company pays attention to people’s needs when introducing new technology, and 65% of C-suite executives say they experience frustration from technology at work. This is a growing issue that IT teams are clamoring to fix and are facing obstacles when doing so. In this blog, we discuss how IT teams can increase visibility of their application landscape to improve their user’s digital employee experience (DEX).

Visibility challenges for IT

IT teams are handling hundreds, if not thousands, of user applications across their environment. IT teams also need to provide a positive digital employee experience (DEX) for their modern workforce. This is a significant challenge for IT teams as they may be blind to application issues causing employee unhappiness, especially at scale. IT teams need to be able to quickly understand any application issue and quickly identify the root cause in order to provide a quick fix.

IT teams currently struggle to reduce their mean time to resolution for these types of issues due to a lack of application visibility and root cause analysis. Only adding to the pressure on the IT team, not only can these application issues create a poor user experience, but they also can directly affect a company's revenue when business-critical applications experience major issues or outages.

For IT teams to have this visibility and ultimately decrease mean time to resolution, they need to use and adopt a tool that can provide application performance data. Application experience analytics involves the systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of data related to user interactions, application performance, and infrastructure. This data is then used to gain insights into the overall user experience, identify areas for improvement, and optimize application performance. Help desk tickets will eventually surface this data, but IT teams must be proactively aware of application issues before users may even become aware at scale. By proactively resolving problems, organizations can minimize disruption, maximize uptime, and ensure that employees and customers have seamless access to critical applications.

Addressing the lack of application visibility

There’s no question, making sure IT has appropriate application visibility is essential to improve mean time to resolution and, by extension, wider business outcomes. But how can we address that gap?

Tools and raw data are important. But more important is understanding the meaning behind application data, including speed and responsiveness. This is where an Application Experience tool can come in and provide this necessary information to IT teams. As Forrester explains, "While many organizations focus on tools to measure and enhance DEX, the path to success starts long before the tools discussions." When looking for a tool, IT teams need to make sure there's real-time application data, but also meaningful insights to provide context to the data. For example, application load time is a critical piece of information, but one must contextualize this data against the entire device landscape to provide value. An example of this is the p95 performance metric, an industry standard to display response times and performance monitoring. (The p95 metric provides insights into performance experienced by many users. By looking at the 95th percentile, it accounts for ‌performance impact on a vast majority of users, rather than just focusing on the average or median. It helps capture a more realistic view of performance under varying conditions.)

In this blog, we discussed the importance for IT teams to provide a positive digital employee experience (DEX) regarding user application experience and highlighted how a lack of application visibility can make it difficult for IT to do so. The most successful way to increase application performance visibility is by investing in an Application Experience tool, which can provide vital insights about the root cause of any application issue leading to a faster fix.

To learn more about these types of tools, please see 1E’s product offerings at 1e.com.