A shift is taking place within the IT industry. Digital Employee Experience (DEX), once a niche “nice-to-have” for end-user computing (EUC) teams, is rapidly becoming a must-have. As employees come to expect consumer-level technology experiences and businesses seek to provide them, EUC teams are leading the charge by adopting a DEX strategy and toolset.
Yet even once the DEX tooling has been deployed, EUC teams may struggle to build support for their DEX strategy across the larger IT department. Whether due to siloes, resistance to new approaches, or simply overburdened teams lacking time for new innovations, the IT department fails to understand and adopt this new employee-first approach. But without larger support, a DEX strategy can only achieve so much. If your network, application, and other IT teams are not onboard, there is only so much you can improve the employee experience. How can EUC teams address these challenges and build support for DEX?
There are a few key strategies that can be employed to achieve wider adoption:
Internal Champions
Once in place on enough endpoints in your environment, a DEX tool offers new visibility into the performance of devices and applications from the employee’s perspective. This visibility can offer new diagnosis for old issues and raise awareness of previously unknown issues. For example, a repetitive application crash issue could be revealed to be connected to the VPN. As an EUC leader, when you find these initial wins, share them broadly—especially if these wins can make other teams outside of EUC look good. Share and celebrate the new context that your DEX strategy offers. By sharing these wins, you may be able to identify a vital component to your adoption strategy: internal champions.
Internal champions are those inside your IT department—but outside of the EUC team—who quickly understand the value of DEX. These champions can lend credibility to your new tool and strategy, as they aren’t part of your team and aren’t responsible for justifying the investment. The more internal champions you can get excited about the results of your DEX initiative, the faster awareness and adoption of DEX data will spread.
Share data with your application teams to help them in their negotiations with vendors. Support your network teams in diagnosing whether or not issues are actually network issues. The more you can leverage DEX data to support other teams in their initiatives, while also achieving your own EUC objectives, the faster you’ll find internal champions and build support for DEX.
Getting executive buy-in
For the fastest adoption of your DEX strategy, you need leadership buy-in. Management and especially executive management are essential for project success. This buy-in can be garnered in many different ways, but there are a few that stick out:
First, provide exceptional white-glove service to VIPs with your DEX tool. Tag VIP machines, set-up VIP specific dashboards and ensure your VIPs have a seamless technology experience every single day, no matter when or where they are working. The experience may be so exceptional that they don’t notice – but when they do comment on their high performing machines, you can take the opportunity to sing the praises of your DEX solution.
Secondly, bring DEX data to leadership to guide strategic decisions. Build high impact dashboards to monitor business critical applications, devices and teams and bring those insights to leadership. Once management learns the powerful insights that can be garnered from a DEX solution, they will come to value and rely on the data, often encouraging other teams to reach out to your EUC team to find ways to leverage it. With management buy-in, adoption of DEX tooling and data will spread much more rapidly.
Evangelize the benefits of DEX
The success of your DEX initiative relies on your ability to evangelize your team’s work and achievements. By leveraging these strategies, you can build understanding and support for DEX, amplifying the impact of your work.
