A Lakeside Software White Paper. Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity

Transcription

1 A Lakeside Software White Paper Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity

2 2 Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity Table of Contents IT s Role in Digital Transformation... 3 The Cost of the Visibility Gap... 4 Three Data Sources for Well-Rounded DEM... 5 Real-User Monitoring at the Endpoint... 5 Synthetic Transactions... 6 Qualitative Feedback... 6 DEM in Action... 6 Continuous User Segmentation (Personas)... 7 Need-Based Procurement... 7 Proactive Support... 8 IT/Service Provider SLA Transparency... 8 Budget Rationalization... 9 Transform IT, Transform the Organization... 9 SysTrack s Workspace Analytics Model References For More Information... 11

3 3 Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity IT s Role in Digital Transformation Across industries, digital transformation is changing the way goods and services are delivered and fundamentally altering the path to success. Just ask yourself: when you want to buy a book, hail a ride, make travel plans, or set a timer, how do you go about doing so? Organizations are always adapting, but the pace of change has accelerated due to the proliferation of new technology and the increasing stakes of failing to keep up. The best IT departments will help meet these challenges by innovating alongside the organization and prioritizing the digital experiences of end users. According to Gartner estimates, By 2018, 25% of large organizations will have an explicit strategy to make their corporate computing environment similar to a consumer computing experience. 1 This approach is no longer a nice to have, but an imperative for IT, as consumers and other facets of the business become increasingly capable of self-provisioning technology. Think back on the transformation that happened as a result of the rise of consumer devices like laptops, tablets, and smartphones. As employees started bringing their own devices to work and harnessing the benefits of greater mobility, IT had to address the challenge of managing those devices from the bottom-up. Now, IT can enable end users to work regardless of time of day or location. Today, the biggest transformation facing IT is the fragmented and decentralized nature of the end-user computing environment. We live in a world where any given organization has physical and virtual desktops, mobile or in-the-office employees, critical applications delivered as SaaS, you name it! Ultimately, IT is challenged with ensuring the performance and compliance of any technology within the organization. Given fragmented and constantly evolving environments, how can IT adapt to put end users first? Application performance monitoring (APM) and its subset, end-user experience monitoring (EUEM), are technologies that IT has used to manage end-user experiences and system performance, but neither offers a complete solution to the current IT challenge. Instead, digital experience monitoring (DEM) has emerged as a new method for gaining insight into the digital experiences of end users. DEM creates a complete picture of end-user experience by analyzing usage as well as performance data over all applications and services that an end user and groups of end users interact with. To accomplish this broadened perspective, DEM makes use of multiple data sources. In this white paper, we will be focusing on three of these sources real-user monitoring at the endpoint, synthetic monitoring, and qualitative feedback and five use cases that can be powered by a comprehensive DEM practice. 1 Gartner, Elevate the Employee Experience With Consumer-Oriented IT Service Delivery, Matthew W. Cain, Brian Prentice, and Mike Gotta, Refreshed 17 July 2017, Published 8 April 2016, G ,

4 4 Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity Before embarking on a discussion of how to perform and apply DEM, we d like to briefly address the business case, as that represents a budgeting hurdle for many organizations. 2 The Cost of the Visibility Gap End-user experience is a term used to describe the quality of consumers interactions with technology, either in real-time or aggregate. Influential factors include system performance and availability, end-user perception of a technology or service, and job role/user persona. Optimizing end-user experience is broadly recognized as a service goal for IT. According to research by Digital Enterprise Journal (DEJ), 58% of organizations reported monitoring IT performance from [the] user perspective as a strategic goal for IT transformation. 3 However, the amount of resources dedicated to such projects varies. 4 Part of the reason for this discrepancy is that many organizations lack the ability to quantify end-user experience and therefore truly measure and understand its influence and determining factors. When end-user experience is quantified as the amount of time an end user interacts with his or her system without experiencing negative performance impacts, it is possible to objectively track changes in productivity over time. Analysis of Lakeside customer data has resulted in the following findings: Score 5 End-User Productivity Impact Average Productivity 98.5% 39.4 hours/week 93.5% 37.4 hours/week 85% 34.0 hours/week 70% 28.0 hours/week Table 1: Based on Lakeside client user data/40 hours per week On average, new Lakeside customers start off with an overall end-user experience score of 80%, translating to a productivity loss of 8 hours/week per full-time employee (FTE). Within two years, average experience climbs 8%, 2 Research conducted by Digital Enterprise Journal found that 47% of organizations surveyed reported inability to build a business case as the main barrier for investment in IT Operations solutions. Bojan Simic, "17 Areas Shaping IT Operations Market in 2018." Digital Enterprise Journal, January Simic, "17 Areas Shaping IT Operations Market in 2018." 4 In a survey we conducted through IDG Research on October 2-9, 2017, 44% of IT decision makers agreed with the statement, My company does not measure the quality of the IT user experience. 5 The end-user experience score is a key performance indicator (KPI) built out of lower-level KPIs (application performance, login time, CPU, memory, etc.). To calculate the score, we divide the total time a user is impacted by the total time they are active. By subtracting that number from 100, we are left with the percentage of time that a user was experiencing a nonimpacted session. We group scores into four categories: Excellent is 97% and above, Good is >90% and <97%, Fair is >80% and <90%, and Poor is everything below that.

5 5 Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity meaning that productivity per FTE improves by 3.2 hours/week. 6 Scaled over, for example, 10,000 users, that change amounts to 32,000 more productive hours per week or roughly 1.7 million per year. Without insight into end-user experience, it is difficult to determine how much poor technology performance is impacting an organization s bottom line. By including end-user experience as a key performance indicator, executives can realize the true cost of inefficient systems and strategically allocate resources for initiatives like DEM. Three Data Sources for Well-Rounded DEM A defining characteristic of DEM is the necessity of incorporating multiple types of data to achieve a complete picture of users digital experience. What data sources you choose depends in part on whether you are monitoring customers/external users (most commonly website interactions) or employees (in general, a more complex task set). When monitoring internal users, IT has greater visibility into things like hardware and application stacks as well as the potential to adjust the experience from the end user s workspace. Consequently, IT can perform more detailed monitoring, including end-user experience scoring. For these reasons, we recommend a foundation of detailed endpoint monitoring in conjunction with other data streams. In particular, synthetic transactions are useful for proactive testing and qualitative feedback rounds out the DEM approach by incorporating end users opinions. Real-User Monitoring at the Endpoint Real-user monitoring (RUM) is, as it sounds, the practice of analyzing usage and performance data based on real user interactions. It can be performed in real-time and/or presented as a historical record for the purpose of establishing trends and root cause analysis. Different data sources may be classified as RUM, but endpoint collection provides the most detailed and actionable data and is preferable in the employee DEM scenario. Endpoints can be physical or virtual desktops, laptops, thin clients, etc. Ideally, one DEM solution would monitor all types of endpoints to reduce management complexity. RUM metrics that can be captured include login and boot times, CPU, disk, memory, network data, application crashes and dependencies, hardware and software details, and more. Crucially, endpoint monitoring provides the most accurate and objective view of end-user experience in the environment, as the data comes directly from the user s machine. RUM helps answer data-driven questions: Are users accessing the applications they ve been licensed? If not, can they be moved to lower-cost versions? Which user population tends to have the worst end-user experience? What are the major causes of impact? 6 Source: SysTrack Community data

6 6 Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity Which users are good candidates for VDI? What about thin clients? Synthetic Transactions Synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) involves simulating user workloads (e.g. login, launching browsers, sending , etc.) and observing how long they take to complete. This method is useful for testing repeatable, everyday actions as it does not require real user involvement and can therefore be used to ensure that services are performing correctly before they are accessed. If a transaction shows that a workload is taking longer than expected, IT can use RUM to pinpoint the performance issue. STM helps answer questions about critical services: Are SaaS applications meeting their SLAs for uptime? How long does it take users in [location] to launch Outlook? When coupled with RUM, STM can be used to perform more complex performance testing: How will an OS upgrade affect CPU utilization? Is the source of a SaaS issue on the provider s side or coming from the IT environment? Qualitative Feedback Unlike RUM and STM, the goal of gathering qualitative feedback for DEM is to gain insight into end users subjective experiences rather than what can be observed through hard data. Feedback can come in a variety of forms, but common examples are word of mouth, workplace social media, help desk calls, and surveys. Incorporating qualitative data into a DEM strategy helps ensure that IT and end users agree about service quality and user satisfaction. Listening to what employees have to say can be an important step in breaking down barriers between end users and IT. Qualitative feedback helps answer questions about employees relationships with technology: Why did a user download an application with similar functionality to one that was provisioned by IT? How does a user feel about his/her experience after a service desk interaction? DEM in Action DEM gives IT a better starting point for common use cases and opens doors to more elusive ones. Currently, many IT organizations struggle to make their data actionable, which raises the question of how they are finding value in their current tools. Applying a user experience focus gives IT the ability to address use cases that deliver relevant business insights, including personas, need-based procurement, SLA transparency, budget rationalization, and proactive support. In the words of one Lakeside client, a premier Turkish financial institution, Being able to provide proactive support required us to have very detailed information about the performance of devices, operation systems, and applications of our business users so that we could prevent and resolve as many

7 7 Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity issues as possible before they could escalate. We needed a tool that gave us visibility into what was going on in those endpoints. Thanks to a combination of rich data and an end-user focus, DEM is a catalyst for many historically challenging IT use cases: Continuous User Segmentation (Personas) Personas are user models that help simplify IT management by categorizing users into observable groups based on workstyles and mobility needs. This segmentation allows IT to take strategic actions to improve the experience of intelligently-defined populations and can help translate the impact of IT to the business. Read more about the uses and benefits of personas in our white paper, Using SysTrack to Automate the Development and Management of Enterprise Personas. Figure 1: A SysTrack chart showing the number of critical applications per persona group. This information could help IT determine which applications to provision to different groups or find users that may be suited to different application delivery methods. Need-Based Procurement Assigning technologies to users based on their individual needs helps optimize hardware and software provisioning and save organizations money and service headaches over one-size-fits-all solutions. Needs can be defined by a number of characteristics, including personas, hardware age, software packages, location, and performance metrics.

8 8 Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity Figure 2: An excerpt from a SysTrack report showing which users are ready for an OS upgrade. Proactive Support Since 2014, there has been a 53% increase in the number of organizations using technologies to remediate issues before end users experience impacts. Such technologies can intelligently alert IT to issues in real-time and help automate the service desk resolution process. Organizations that implement proactive support report spending less money on IT staff in addition to improved mean time to resolution (MTTR) and uptime. 3 Figure 3: A dashboard showing alarms by location. IT/Service Provider SLA Transparency As key technologies adopt service models, it is critical for IT to retain insight into their performance and availability. Monitoring SLAs helps ensure that IT isn t wasting money paying for services that cannot be accessed.

9 9 Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity Figure 4: Synthetic transactions show whether a service is functioning as desired. RUM data helps discover the root cause of service problems. Budget Rationalization As mentioned earlier, justifying spend is a major roadblock for many IT organizations due to the difficulty of quantifying the effect of IT actions. DEM metrics like end-user experience help demonstrate the impact of IT on end-user productivity, which can help build the case for increased investment in digital transformation. Figure 5: End-user experience trend in SysTrack. Transform IT, Transform the Organization Productivity and productivity with technology are now virtually synonymous. With greater visibility into enduser experience and its impacts, IT can optimize resources and processes to improve end-user productivity with critical technologies. Organizations that adopt this approach through a comprehensive DEM strategy will be wellpositioned to support digital transformation and other challenges ahead.

10 10 Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity Beyond DEM SysTrack s Workspace Analytics Model DEM is a foundational component of a broader IT model known as workspace analytics, which analyzes the intersections between people, business processes, and technology. By enabling visibility into how these core facets of an organization interconnect, workspace analytics helps optimize end-user productivity and align IT with the business. SysTrack, Lakeside s workspace analytics solution, provides all the capabilities you need to support DEM as well as IT asset optimization, event correlation and analysis, and desktop transformation. By instrumenting endpoints with a lightweight agent, SysTrack collects and analyzes tens of thousands of metrics that help IT teams understand and improve end-user experience. Learn more in our white paper, Succeed with Workspace Analytics for IT. To learn more about what DEM and workspace analytics can do for your IT environment, contact Lakeside for a free demo: References Gartner. Elevate the Employee Experience With Consumer-Oriented IT Service Delivery. Matthew W. Cain, Brian Prentice, and Mike Gotta. Refreshed 17 July 2017, Published 8 April G Simic, Bojan. "17 Areas Shaping IT Operations Market in 2018." Digital Enterprise Journal, January 2018.

11 11 Digital Experience Monitoring for Optimal End-User Productivity For More Information For more information about SysTrack and Lakeside Software please visit us on the web Lakeside Software, Inc. Global Headquarters Woodward Avenue, Bloomfield Hills, MI USA Lakeside Software Solutions Limited EMEA Headquarters Morgan House, Madeira Walk, Windsor, Windsor and Maidenhead, SL4 1EP, UK +44 (0) Lakeside Software Pty Limited Australia/New Zealand Headquarters Level 17, 40 Mount Street, Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia +61 (2) Lakeside Software, Inc Lakeside Software and SysTrack are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of Lakeside Software, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.