Drive IT Value, Business Strategy with Executive-Level Insights

Clear, high-level data is key to demonstrating the value of IT and technology initiatives to business leaders

The success of tech initiatives and strategies can be found in even the smallest victories — whether it’s shaving a few minutes off the average bootup time or preventing network latency from disrupting critical web applications. 

Unfortunately, that’s not always evident outside the IT department.  

To really demonstrate the value of IT to business leaders and executives, it helps to have a simplified, high-level view of what’s happening across the IT estate, according to William Smierciak, IT manager at Florida Blue, the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. Through Smierciak, the healthcare insurance company has taken on remote work and other IT challenges using Lakeside Software’s digital experience management (DEM) solution. 

“Seeing the overall health (of digital environments), especially from an executive dashboard, really does kind of provide a nice and clear understanding of where we are,” Smierciak said during a recent webinar with Lakeside, “especially with comparing to all the other companies based on industry region, etc.” 

With these insights readily accessible through Lakeside’s Digital Experience Cloud, powered by SysTrack, IT teams can effectively communicate the value of tech initiatives to business leaders, as well as inform business decisions that improve digital employee experience (DEX), increase productivity, and keep organizations agile in a constantly changing technology landscape. 

Here are a few more key insights from Lakeside’s webinar “IT as a Value Driver: How to Communicate the Value of Tech Initiatives to Executive Leaders.” 

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WEBINAR

IT as a Value Driver 
How to Communicate the Value of Tech Initiatives to Executive Leaders

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Hybrid Work is Now a Permanent Part of Business 

Let’s face it — remote and hybrid work are here to stay. Period. 

In the United States and United Kingdom, more than half of knowledge workers are expected to be remote by the end of 2022, according to a prediction by Gartner.¹ Worldwide, a total of about 31% of workers are likely to be either hybrid or fully remote in 2022. 

That requires IT teams to evolve in order to meet the demands of this new kind of working environment. The success of remote and hybrid work structures hinges on having the right technology accessible to end users with minimal interruptions. 

In Lakeside Software’s own research, conducted this year by ESI ThoughtLab, 60% of employees surveyed around the globe agree technology plays a large or very large role in working remotely. Workers depend on their devices, network connections, and cloud-based apps and services more than ever before to collaborate, meet deadlines, and meet customers’ needs from anywhere — whether it’s at home, in the office, or any place in between.  

But distributed workforces also make it harder for IT to provide necessary resources and support. Without IT pros being able to walk down the hall and access devices directly, there’s a greater potential for blind spots across the digital environment that could negatively impact digital employee experience. 

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BLOG POST

What Companies Win and Lose When Moving to a Hybrid Workplace 

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IT Leaders Face New, Unique Challenges 

Without clear visibility throughout the IT estate, organizations are left to wonder where the gaps might be and how to fix them. 

Are users utilizing their resources effectively? Is the organization over- or under-provisioning its employees? Does the service desk structure or deployment of transformation projects affect productivity? 

Without knowing the answers to these questions, IT and business leaders run the risk of hurting their bottom lines. Employees on average are working at only 60% capacity due to technology infrastructure and toolset limitations, according to Lakeside’s research, and lose almost an hour (54 minutes) per week in productivity due to tech issues. 

And the cost of that lost productivity and user frustration can quickly add up. For an organization with 5,000 employees, that could mean up to 4,500 hours lost per week and more than 200,000 hours lost per year.

“One of the key components that we are looking at on a regular basis is how much time is lost due to our technology,” Smierciak said during Lakeside’s webinar. “That goes for everything as basic as a simple bootup process all the way through to application latency, network latency, local device systemic problems, or individualized problems.” 

In order to deal with productivity-related problems and revenue loss, though, IT teams first need to effectively demonstrate and communicate these issues to higher levels in the business. Yet IT is often unable to do so due to: 

• Fragmented or unavailable IT health, end-user productivity, and downtime datasets 
• Inability to measure the impact of technology performance on employee experience 
• Inability to monitor work-from-anywhere devices — both online and offline 
• Inability to translate technical data metrics to business outcomes 

Better DEX is Key to Evolving Businesses 

Organizations in which IT is able to communicate digital insights clearly and inform business decisions also tend to have a larger focus on digital employee experience. And with better DEX comes increased productivity and greater employee satisfaction, leading to better business outcomes 

But how to get those insights? 

The latest updates to Lakeside’s Digital Experience Cloud provide organizations a few ways to demonstrate the value of tech initiatives at a high level and jumpstart the journey to greater DEX maturity: 

Executive Insights 

The Executive Insights feature provides a high-level view of the IT estate, helping C-suite leaders drive informed business strategy. By combining historical and real-time information from across the digital environment in quick, understandable reports, these insights reveal much-needed context through health scoring, community benchmarks, persona management, and productivity tracking.  

Web Application Analysis 

Web Application Analysis, a data drill-down available in Lakeside’s L3 Root Cause Analysis tool, helps service desk technicians spot, troubleshoot, and correct problems proactively. By surfacing performance, error, and usage metrics of web apps, Lakeside captures the actionable IT analytics needed to manage the entire employee ecosystem. 

DEX Library 

The DEX Library is a collection of out-of-the-box solutions — called DEX packs — that build on the data collected by the Intelligent Edge within Lakeside’s Digital Experience Cloud. These solutions, called DEX packs, are uniquely powerful due to the underlying foundation of industry-leading data that support automated analysis, prescriptive visualizations, and focused insights for each pack. 

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Want to Drive Greater IT Value? 

Explore the insights your IT team needs to effectively communicate with business leaders and drive businesses forward. Request a custom demo. 

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^{1. Gartner, “Gartner Forecasts 51% of Global Knowledge Workers will be Remote by the End of 2021,” 22 June 2021.↩}

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