Mastering IT Management: Why Visibility, Control, and Compliance Are Key to Improving Digital Employee Experience (DEX)

Managing a modern IT environment can feel like spinning a thousand plates at once. Between cloud services, remote devices, and countless applications, keeping everything in check is a huge challenge. But at the core of any well-run IT estate are three key pillars: visibility, control, and compliance. Get these right, and you’ve got the foundation for a secure, efficient, and stable system.   

The fast-maturing Digital Employee Experience (DEX) market adds a crucial new layer to this mix—a requirement to prioritize workloads, remediate friction and measure success in terms of end user satisfaction. DEX tools provide you with insights into where productivity–killing friction exists. They also give you visibility into how your end-users are feeling about your IT operations. However, you still need a solid foundation of core IT management to ensure everything works smoothly. Let’s break it down. 

Pillar 1: Visibility—Know What’s in Your IT Estate 

The first pillar, visibility, is all about knowing what you’ve got. With businesses running a mix of on-premises systems, cloud-based services, and hybrid setups, keeping track of every device, application, and user in the IT estate can feel like herding cats. But without this knowledge, you’re flying blind, which opens the door to inefficiencies and security risks. 

Visibility tools give you a bird’s-eye view of your entire IT landscape. They let you see everything from which devices are connected, to how employees use applications, to where potential vulnerabilities might be lurking. The goal isn’t just to gather data; it’s to get the kind of actionable insights that help you spot issues before they become bigger problems. Without visibility, you’re essentially guessing what’s happening across your environment—and that’s a risky way to manage your IT.   

Pillar 2: Control—Fix Issues in Real-Time  

Visibility is only the first step; control is what allows you to act on what you’re seeing. Once you’ve identified a problem or a potential risk, you need to be able to fix it quickly—ideally before it impacts the end user. 

Control is all about having the tools and processes to manage your IT environment in real-time. Think about it as the ability to adjust settings, patch systems, or resolve security issues remotely, without needing to physically touch devices. And it's not just about responding to problems; it's also about staying ahead of them by using predictive analytics to spot potential issues before they happen. 

In short, with the right level of control, you can keep your IT systems running smoothly and efficiently, while minimizing downtime and keeping users happy. 

Pillar 3: Compliance—Keep Everything Secure and Standardized 

Compliance might be daunting, but it's crucial in today’s IT world. Keeping in line with industry standards, internal policies, and legal regulations isn’t just about avoiding fines—it's about maintaining a secure and reliable environment. 

With regulations constantly evolving (think GDPR, HIPAA, and other data protection laws), staying compliant can feel like a full-time job. But by automating compliance processes and using tools that automatically fix configuration drift (i.e., when systems veer away from the "best-known" settings), you can ensure your IT estate is always in a safe, compliant state. This way, you don’t have to worry about leaving yourself open to security breaches or costly legal penalties. 

How DEX Fits into the Picture 

So, where does DEX (Digital Employee Experience) fit in? The importance of DEX cannot be overstated, as the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Management Tools highlights. Simply put, DEX tools help you measure how end users feel about their digital work environment, understand where friction exists, and remediate in real-time before friction turns to frustration. They track sentiment and give IT teams a clearer understanding of how well their systems are performing from the user's perspective. 

But here’s the thing: Good DEX is an outcome of strong IT management, not a function in and of itself. The core pillars—visibility, control, and compliance—are still doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. DEX tools are like the icing on the cake, providing a feedback loop that lets you fine-tune your operations based on real-time user satisfaction data. But ultimately, they rely on a solid foundation of well-managed IT to deliver that positive experience in the first place. 

Wrapping it Up 

At the end of the day, managing an IT estate effectively means mastering visibility, control, and compliance. With those three pillars in place, you’ve got the foundation for a secure, efficient, and high-performing IT environment. DEX adds a layer of sophistication, helping you understand how users are experiencing the tools and systems you’ve worked hard to put in place. But remember, DEX is the result of strong IT operations, not a replacement. 

By focusing on these core pillars and leveraging DEX as a tool for prioritization and improvement, you can keep your IT estate running smoothly, your users happy, and your business moving forward.