I was recently explaining the importance of digital employee experience (DEX) management to a consultant who is a self-described "digital nomad" and works from wherever he pleases. The connection to DEX may not have entirely been clear, until I explained that his ability to easily do his work remotely using online tools exemplifies what good DEX is all about in the era of Everywhere Work.

Improving DEX delivers benefits for IT efficiency, employee productivity and retention, unified endpoint management (UEM) and even cybersecurity. Based on our work in implementing digital employee experience management over the years, here are five top use cases we've seen where improving DEX can drive benefits for IT and security operations.

Enable discovery and visibility for your IT estate

The first use case we should explore when it comes to digital employee experience management is enabling discovery and visibility. It might not seem like it's related to DEX management. But it's essential for delivering quality digital experiences.

Unless you can discover and transparently monitor all the devices, assets and connections that are part of your IT estate, you're never going to be able to maximize DEX or reap other benefits, such as remediating vulnerabilities or delivering effective UEM. It comes down to this: to improve digital experiences being delivered via digital endpoints, you need to know what and where your endpoints are.

In our own research, we found that 31% of IT professionals were still using spreadsheets to track IT assets. When COVID-19 hit, IT departments were forced into a fast pivot to enable remote work. They took whatever measures they could to cope with the new work paradigm forced on them by the pandemic. This also meant providing the devices and tools employees needed to work from anywhere.

But afterward, many organizations throttled back on post-COVID IT spending. And now the challenge is how to best rein all this back in and gain control over your IT estate. One customer in the travel industry implemented an endpoint management solution because they needed to know what's actually going on in my environment? How many remote devices do I have? Where are they? Where are they connecting from? Where are they accessing information? Who's doing it?

They'd been relying on spreadsheets to track IT assets, but they knew that was unsustainable for a business with any significant number of distributed devices and apps. I've found that customers who adopt a solution that automates identification of all the assets on their network are nearly always surprised — sometimes shocked — at the results.

One transportation provider using our discovery solution was amazed to find there were 30% more devices on their network than they had expected.

There can be serious, costly conconsequences from not knowing all the assets on your network. For instance, an IT infrastructure's "ghost assets" can create a scary variety of compliance risks. Those can range from regulatory issues to inadvertently violating vendor contracts. Or maybe there's a networked fish tank thermometer somewhere that will let hackers breach your casino.

One transportation provider found it had 30% more devices on its network than expected.

Reduce the burden on your IT team

"Can you help me retrieve my password?" That's one of the most mundane — and common — requests to devour the time of an IT helpdesk. Only 34% of IT organizations have automated more than half of their network provisioning and change management tasks, meaning that a tremendous amount of IT tasks are still done manually. This is obviously a big drain on their time and a major expense for the organization. Plus, it drags them away from more strategic, high-value work.

What can lift this burden off their shoulders? A digital employee experience management platform that employs intelligent data collection and analysis with automated remediation. The root causes of the most common user experience issues can be automatically identified and resolved rapidly.

However, Ivanti's 2023 DEX Report finds that only a limited number of organizations are looking into self-healing technology to proactively solve IT issues. This frees administrators for more important work. Better yet, this improves the job satisfaction and morale of your IT team. They're spending less time firefighting, more time focused on more interesting and strategic projects.

Optimize device and app management

The average business user employs 2.6 connected devices during their workday. This gives them flexibility while creating challenges for IT teams. At many companies, those teams must support a minimum of four different operating environments — Windows, macOS, iOS and Android — to serve all employees. Each has its own unique configurations, applications, services and security protocols.

The arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) is only making this more of a challenge. This means IT departments will absolutely need to automate as much of the monitoring and management of their device estate as possible to protect DEX, because when a device fails, doesn't integrate properly or isn't up to date, it drags down the user experience and stalls productivity. It's also why it's vital to deploy a digital employee experience management platform to help optimize user experiences across all those devices.

Kingston University in London realized that they were seeing battery failures on certain devices. They used endpoint management to monitor battery lifecycles and set thresholds so that when a battery was nearing end-of-life, a process was automatically triggered to send the user a replacement.

It's a case where proactively heading off a potential issue for a user before it affects them improves DEX.

How can you get outstanding DEX while improving IT operations?

Enhance security and compliance

How does adoption of a digital employee experience platform to improve DEX enhance security? The connection is obvious, when you consider it: when security measures are automated and don't interfere with employees' workaday activities, many compliance headaches simply vanish.

An Harvard Business Review survey found 67% of employees said they’d failed to fully adhere to cybersecurity policies at least once.

For example, by automatically installing a security patch on a remote device, you avoid the chance an employee might neglect a manual update. Patching will be smarter, faster and more efficient because your system will automatically prioritize vulnerabilities. Responsible DEX solutions reduce friction when workers need to access business resources, too.

Digital employee experience management should be able to spot potential IT and security issues before they impact the organization. It should also make recommendations on actions to remediate them and improve DEX. This way, problems get headed off before they even reach the proverbial pass.

Another benefit of automating these processes? Reducing the overall costs of security and compliance. This is attractive at a time when compliance managers are predicting higher costs, with nine of 10 respondents to an Accenture survey saying they expected "evolving business, regulatory, and customer demands to increase both their compliance-related and compliance operating costs by up to 30%" over 2023–24.

Streamline costs

Procurement is always a time-consuming and resource-intensive task for IT teams. Whether they're acquiring new devices, retiring older ones or trying to gauge whether they should sunset applications, it's a process where they're constantly dealing with a deluge of tasks like new user onboarding, license renewals and more.

A digital employee experience management solution that uses conversational AI and collaboration tools can solicit real-time, interactive feedback from users to track DEX and device/application performance.

This data can provide great guidance for answering key questions like, which devices or apps are being used most productively? What licenses are really being used, and which ones should we let expire? Is somebody requesting a device that we might reallocate instead of buying new hardware and software?

This way, an organization can optimize its hardware and software procurement budget while elevating DEX by supplying employees with the most appropriate and effective tools available.

Investing in digital employee experience (DEX) presents a powerful opportunity for IT to become a true strategic partner across the entire organization. Find out how to advocate for DEX in IT by checking out the fireside chat video below.