IT Leaders Share Their Top Priorities

By Annie O’Brien, Group Product Manager, Lakeside Software

From healthcare and retail to warehouses and manufacturing facilities, IT leaders spend countless hours—and dollars—striving to improve the digital employee experience (DEX). Even though they understand how vital DEX is, however, most companies still lack a strategic, comprehensive approach.

So, how do top organizations plan to capitalize on all the benefits of improving DEX? A recent survey of IT leaders captured their top priorities, revealing a wealth of valuable insights—including the need for greater enterprise-wide visibility into the IT estate.

1. Visibility allows for simplicity

One of the top challenges for IT leaders is simplifying complex IT projects—which is why nearly half of the survey respondents named simplification as a top priority. Global technology powerhouse Lenovo shared similar insights in its IT Resiliency Report, stating, “The more complex the technology landscape, the more challenging it is for the CIO to enact organization-wide digital transformation and prioritize initiatives and investments that will deliver business outcomes.”

The benefits of simplification are clear: you can move faster and gain a competitive edge. As the survey report explained, a streamlined approach lets you improve operational efficiency and lower your risks, “enabling organizations to adapt more swiftly to evolving business needs.” 

But where do you start? First, you need to know where you are right now. That means establishing critical baselines that you can use to measure your progress moving forward. Next, consider one of the most effective ways to get complete visibility: gathering real-time data through high-quality endpoint health monitoring. Every laptop, tablet, and device tells a story—and you can use these data insights to track the impact of IT and proactively address any potential concerns. The earlier you can implement a DEX tool that includes rich data and endpoint monitoring, the more benefits you’ll see as you roll out tech transformations throughout your organization.

2. Endpoint data leads to higher DEX scores

The second-highest priority for survey respondents was delivering a better digital employee experience. Most companies already recognize the value their employees contribute to the bottom line (for instance, Microsoft has stated, “we believe our employees are the company’s greatest asset.”) Yet industry research continues to highlight the troubling trend of employees being frustrated with their workplace technology: Nearly half of digital workers struggle to find the information they need. In addition, more than one-third have thought about quitting due to a poor digital experience. For today’s employees, technology choice is one of the most critical factors for their overall satisfaction, as Compucom has noted.

As companies prioritize DEX, they can improve employee satisfaction and engagement, which leads to greater retention and productivity gains for employees. The good news is that more companies are focused on DEX. In 2021, only 5% of IT organizations had an established digital employee experience strategy, team, and management tool, according to Gartner®; by 2025, this percentage is expected to grow to 50%. 

While there are many tools and strategies for improving DEX, new AI-driven methods are gaining more attention thanks to their ability to help IT teams proactively identify IT issues “before they turn into widespread disruptions to employee productivity,” according to the IT Business Leaders survey report. Today, leading organizations use endpoint data to fuel their AI models, allowing the AI to highlight the issues that directly affect employees, while also minimizing costly downtime (and frustration) among the workforce.

3. Smarter tech allows companies to do more with less

How do you uncover cost-savings of $4.3 million? For one financial services firm, the answer was simple: use endpoint data to identify unused software, leading to a savings opportunity of millions of dollars. Another organization revealed nearly $10 million in waste by analyzing endpoint data from employees’ laptops and realizing they didn’t have to replace the devices as frequently as planned according to a time-based refresh schedule. There was still much life left in the laptops based on specific device performance metrics.

In the IT leadership survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents said their priority is doing more with fewer resources—by far the highest-ranked answer. The key is recognizing the often-hidden factors that may be dragging down your efficiency and eating away at your IT budget.

Once again, the benefits come from having a rich data set from all your devices and the tools to analyze performance and usages data from endpoints and other sources. Access to more high-quality data allows you to gain insights into your employees’ workflows, in turn making more accurate decisions about efficient resource allocation and other organization-wide goals.

Leveraging endpoints to strengthen DEX

When a laptop, kiosk, or handheld device has an issue, your employees are often the first to feel the impact. Providing an exceptional employee experience requires a thorough, ongoing understanding of your digital devices.

When you look at the top three priorities from the IT leaders survey—doing more with less, simplifying complexity, and improving DEX—there’s one thing they have in common: they all get significantly more achievable when you have more visibility into your IT estate by using a data-driven DEX solution. Start there, and you’ll be surprised how far you can go.

Annie O’Brien is a group product manager at Lakeside Software, the #1 AI-powered DEX platform. Known for her proactive and customer-centric approach, Annie excels in managing end-to-end product development within agile frameworks. She has a strong track record of synthesizing user feedback into actionable product requirements and effectively managing key stakeholders.   Her expertise has helped drive product innovation and growth at Lakeside, balancing technical and strategic aspects to exceed customer expectations.

About Lakeside Software

Lakeside Software is how organizations with large, complex IT environments can finally get visibility across their entire digital estate and see how to do more with less. For far too long, IT teams have struggled to see what’s going on in their dark estate – where costly inefficiencies, poor employee experiences, and unresolved problems hide. Only Lakeside lets you give everyone a better view, so they can see the hidden issues, see the smartest fixes, and see the biggest savings. That’s why so many of the world’s leading global brands rely on Lakeside. And it’s how our customers see an average ROI of more than 250%. Learn how you can get a better view at lakesidesoftware.com. Give everyone a better view.™