Could you imagine today if a laptop vendor presented an integrated CD/DVD drive as an advantage?
It would be like referencing a relic from the past, a design that was once useful but is now a major disadvantage. CD/DVD drives were designed because technology wasn’t advanced enough at the time, and the same can be said for vendors who are in the Digital Employee Experience market that still collect offline data.
Twenty years ago, a few vendors avoided solving real technology challenges and instead pushed offline data collection as a viable option. But since its inception, offline data collection was designed to fulfill a specific purpose: to assist VDI Migration projects. Those vendors took a shortcut and unfortunately they’ve left many EUC teams with a fallback solution that fails to meet the scope and challenges that come with managing a modern digital workplace.
EUC Teams, instead, need technology that can help them continuously deliver a high quality of service to employees. Their job requirements consist of being able to:
- See the beginning of any incident before it harms the employee;
- Diagnose its root cause with real time multiple correlation analytics; and
- Fix the issue automatically and decisively before it becomes a top call driver impacting employees or overwhelming IT with incident tickets.
In simpler terms: The dream of all EUC teams is a continuous engineering of the Digital Workplace.
Continuous is important here.
This means IT should be able to see all the time, in real time, what their employees are capable of using, and which applications and which configurations can best serve their work needs. That is why the most important events to be observed, correlated, and analyzed, are the connections from users’ devices to all applications. Offline data would never be able to help in that endeavor.
Offline Data Was Created for a Specific Purpose
Twenty years ago, collecting offline data was a viable shortcut for transformation projects. Imagine you had to calculate the size of a VDI migration for thousands of employees. In that scenario, you wouldn’t need to see the data immediately or find any correlations or insights to help run your day-to-day operations.
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There wasn’t any pressure to instantly send data back to a central repository. Instead, you’d store it on your employees’ devices for a few weeks, and at the end of the assessment phase, you’d pass that data off to a consultant (or team) to make something of it. And that same technological design was applied to other transformation projects.
Today, that approach would be insane. It brings no value, only several risks to both Employees and EUC Teams:
- When data is stored on the employee’s device, it risks harming device performance.
- When data is saved on the employee’s device, then you risk waiting for it to be sent to your database.
- And when you add old data to your dashboards and timelines, you run the risk of making misinformed and rash judgements from skewed diagnostic comparisons, false-positives, and the like.
Offline data solutions were never designed to send information in real time or solve comprehensive work experience questions. Instead, the creators of those tools took a shortcut and avoided the engineering required to figure out how to send data in real time while simultaneously protecting network performance.
Thankfully, that engineering challenge was solved, when few vendors have attempted to address the most important challenge for EUC Teams:
How can they manage a flawless operations environment without any negative impact on employees and ensure people can connect and effectively use their business applications all the time?
Conclusion
There is no need for an integrated CD/DVD drive in work laptops today when we can access our data from the cloud at any time and we can stream videos and music. That space should be used for a more useful feature like a bigger battery for instance. And similarly, there is no need for collecting offline data from users’ devices when we can do everything in real time with no network impact.
And wait a second: Who can work today without being connected one way or another to a network? Nobody.
Employees need to be connected all the time to use their SaaS applications, or access information on their Corporate cloud, even for Office applications like Teams. EUC Teams can engineer the digital workplace, but relying on offline data isn’t the way.