At the 2020 Work From Anywhere Enterprise conference, Steve Brasen, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates, presented an overview of the Digital Experience Management(DEM) market. Here, we present the key competitive insights from the session, comparing Aternity End-User Experience Monitoring, Lakeside Systrack, Nexthink Experience and 1E Tachyon.
The use of technology has never been more personal that it is today, nor so intricately linked to business continuity in times of crisis. For the Work From Anywhere Enterprise, providing employees with the same level of IT support and service performance that they receive in the office is critical and calls for a transformation in organizations’ IT service delivery.
That’s where DEM comes into play. DEM solutions empower IT to tailor an environment to employees’ needs by providing insights to help understand what those needs are. This is achieved by first collecting data on systems, applications, and user perceptions, and then analyzing it. The end result is a rich data set to quantify and enhance employee satisfaction and productivity in the use of IT, as well as to make informed decisions around investment and optimization of the digital workplace.
It’s extremely important that you understand your own business needs and challenges before beginning your product evaluation. This will enable you to identify key product features that most closely align with your top priorities and shortlist the most appropriate solution providers.
Real user sentiment gages how end users feel about a particular application or tool. This data is most effectively collected by surveying end users to determine their level of satisfaction. Although highly subjective, it provides valuable insight into how different users respond to the same conditions in the environment.
Endpoint management holistically looks at the empirical configuration and status information from devices and application to determine if any conditions are, or could be, impacting user experiences. This comparison focuses on systems monitoring, including hardware and operating systems.
Application monitoring seeks to ensure optimal performance of applications by collecting application health analytics. Once considered a separate tool altogether, it’s recently been merged into the DEM space.
This may sound like a very technical term, but in practice it’s a very simple feature. It refers to the ability of a DEM solution to intelligently model conditions in an environment and proactively predict how changes to that environment will affect performance. A DEM solution will collect this data using a variety of “intelligence technology” (analytics, machine learning, cognitive computing, and language processing).
No matter how comprehensive a DEM tool is, it can’t possibly see and do everything in your IT environment, making integration critical. There are two types of integrations to look for in a DEM solution: direct and indirect integrations. Direct integrations are built into the solution and enable specific actions to be performed on or by third-party solutions. Indirect or custom integrations are enabled through an API. Wherever possible, direct integrations should be leveraged as they don’t need to be built or managed.
Remediation, particularly of the proactive kind, is crucial to delivering a great digital employee experience. The ability of a DEM platform to automate and execute processes to fix detected issues ensures common issues are resolved quickly and before they impact the user experience.
