Why Device Visibility Matters for Digital Employee Experiences

When the employee sees the problem before IT does

An employee reports their Mac has been sluggish all morning. For IT, this ticket is the first sign that something is wrong. For the employee however, the problem began earlier and has caused them to lose productivity before anyone on the IT team knew there was anything to triage.

In this second blog in the DEX series, we dive into the crucial role visibility plays in successful digital employee experiences and answer the following question: How much of the employee’s technology experience does IT need to understand before an issue is identified?

A support ticket is useful, but it's a late signal

Support tickets, like employee feedback are valuable to IT, helping them understand processes alongside what’s happening across the fleet. However, they are reactive by design, so by the time a ticket hits the queue, employees have already experienced the friction that has interrupted their workflow.

In short: Upon reviewing the ticket, IT is made aware there is a problem currently and that, due to any potential delays between reporting and initial review, the problem has existed for an undetermined amount of time.

Tickets never say a problem is developing.

Because of this reactive posture, lean IT teams supporting Apple environments relying mainly on employees to surface issues means those teams often work from incomplete artifacts (largely based on word of mouth) versus a complete and clear, data-driven picture of endpoint health.

This speaks to a visibility gap in the IT stack – not a team shortcoming.

There will always be instances where employees encounter issues before IT is aware of them, this is expected. But for proactive teams, the question becomes: how much of the gap between both can be closed?

Managed doesn't always mean visible

It’s important to understand the difference between managed and visible because, despite a belief that they are synonymous – they speak to two different philosophies.

For example, a new Mac is deployed to a user with a necessary app installed:

1. IT verifies the app is installed by checking inventory record.
2. The employee sees the app on their device, however, when launching it, it refuses to open.

The first line means the device is being managed; however, the second line tells us IT lacks real-time visibility into the issue. Perhaps after the next scheduled check-in, IT can determine from those logs that the app has failed to execute, but depending on the delay between check-ins, that relevant piece of data might not be available until several hours later.

What better device visibility can help IT understand

DEX answers a specific question: Is the technology supporting the employee? Answering that takes more than knowing a device checks in or follows policy. It requires visibility into endpoint health, system state and signals that surface where friction points might exist.

Device visibility, in this instance, is about understanding what's happening across the fleet at a practical level, including:

Device health and state.

Are devices performing to baseline or out of scope?

Configuration consistency.

Are devices configured consistently or has drift occurred?

Update status.

Which devices are current with patches, and which have gaps?

Application availability and reliability.

How are the tools employees depend on performing?

Recurring patterns.

What types of issues keep surfacing across the fleet or raised by employees?

From visibility to earlier action.

It’s important to note that visibility isn’t a crystal ball that helps IT predict (or prevent) every technological issue employees may run into. It is designed to see, in real-time, the variables operating across the device fleet that could impact performance if left unchecked:

• Identify patterns across fleets.
• Investigate emerging issues.
• Develop mitigations to correct problems.

How does visibility work as part of a comprehensive strategy?

Visibility provides context that a particular configuration is affected by a recently deployed app update. Before it can affect many of the staff, IT can proactively modify the configuration to address the issue, ensuring that staff remain unaffected by friction while endpoints remain compliant.

Simply put: visibility creates the opportunity for IT to act by addressing a potential problem, rather than respond to a ticket (or tickets) that remediate an issue (or issues).

Device visibility is also a DEX issue

IT teams often view visibility in the context of compliance, inventory and/or reporting. And while that framing isn’t wrong, per se, visibility applies to more than simply compliance-related tasks.

It also provides a clear picture of whether the technology employees rely on works for (or against) them by using visibility to measure DEX around three key capabilities:

1. Endpoint.
2. Application.
3. Network and Infrastructure.

Visibility enables IT teams to shift from guessing at how technology is performing for employees to incorporating the employee’s own experiences as the primary data point to narrow gaps and reduce friction. It provides:

• Holistic views of employee’s technology experiences.
• Granular insight into what works and what doesn’t.
• Actionable data to address problems before escalating.

The takeaway: you can't improve an experience you can't see

Unfortunately, no level of visibility can eliminate risk nor every technology-related problem. A key to bridging gaps between management and digital employee experiences is understanding the difference between:

1. IT that can only react to issues after employees have reported them;
2. And teams that address friction points beforehand, using insight.

Insight enables IT to develop and implement technology solutions with meaningful impact, driven by key metrics, that support digital experiences to meet employees where they are. And it is visibility that empowers growing IT teams through granular insight into fleet and environmental health, to shift from a reactive approach to a proactive methodology.