DEX in context: Forrester EUC Tech Tide 2023 

Forrester recently published their Tech Tide for End-User Computing. What makes this publication so compelling is the coverage of all major End-User Computing (EUC) technology areas in one place. It provides an overview of digital employee experience (DEX) in the context of the wider digital workplace toolset. It also gives us a brilliant employee- experience-focused mandate for EUC (if I were running an EUC or Digital Workplace team, I'd shamelessly steal it and use it as a mission statement):

"[EUC] Is an important contributor to EX. EUC is a set of technologies that allow employees to work productively from anywhere without sacrificing enterprise manageability and security. As companies expand geographically and support various forms of anywhere and hybrid work, EUC is the foundation that enables secure access to task-critical information."

DEX in context

This Forrester report places all EUC technologies in a two-by-two matrix comparing their business value and maturity. Technologies that havent yet reached high levels of business value need investment to bring them up to a higher level of maturity, and then to maintain from that point. Forrester's name for DEX tools is EUEM or End-User Experience Management, which lives in the "Invest" quadrant:

Automated remediation increases the sophistication of end-user experience

The report also talks about focus areas for organizations that have already adopted DEX tooling. One of these areas is automated remediation:

"Existing adopters will likely increase the sophistication of their end-user experience management investments with features like sentiment analysis, digital experience scoring, automated remediation, and cross-industry benchmarking."

This prediction makes intuitive sense as many organizations begin their DEX journey with monitoring and reporting and—as their maturity increases – progress onto fixing these issues at scale. It's especially gratifying to see the focus on remediation as we believe tools that don't have modern, real-time remediation and automation capabilities have a natural maturity "ceiling" – they can only take you so far. Forrester's EUEM Wave 2022, referred to 1E as a "remediation powerhouse".

Business value tied to automation of experience issues

Cost cutting isn't the main objective for DEX / EUEM tools. But, with tougher economic conditions and market penetration moving from early adopter to early majority, bringing a more skeptical eye to investment decisions the business case for DEX tools is especially solid in 2023. The overview tile of the EUEM tools category in the report creates a clear link between automation of experience issues and significant cost reduction.

Expand investments in virtualization optimization over the next 12 months

The report also highlights the need for DEX tooling to provide visibility and remediation of virtual devices and physical devices. It goes further, predicting that organizations will expand investments in technologies to optimize virtualization over the next twelve months:

"DEX monitoring is increasingly important. Thirty-seven percent of respondents to Forrester's Future Of Work Survey, 2022 report that they're working with ongoing problems the service desk can't fix. That's because few EUC professionals have access to data to understand the root cause of issues in the computing environment. Whether physical or virtual, more EUC professionals today are investing in data analytics tools to measure, benchmark, and remediate issues related to the digital employee experience (DEX). Expect organizations to significantly expand investments in end-user experience management and virtualization optimization over the next 12 months."

The maturity/value quadrant currently places this technology as Low Maturity, Low Value and so recommends "Experiment" levels of investment for 2023.

This is especially timely as our new Virtual Desktop Experience capability has just entered 1E Labs, our early adopter program that gives customers a way to offer feedback and input on upcoming releases and product development. (If you’re an existing customer and would like to try this out, please reach out to your account team.)

The report is worth a read, especially if you’re an EUC or Digital Workplace leader. 1E has licensed this report from Forrester, and you can read it in full here.