Gartner Digital Workplace Summit: Powering your digital transformation with gamification and workspace analytics

This week, a group of IT leaders gathered at the Gartner Digital Workplace Summit in London, a conference kicked off with an invigorating keynote on the prevalence and evolvement of the digital society in which we live and work.

“If you are not connected, you might as well not exist,” Frank Buytendijk, Gartner Fellow and VP, expressed during the keynote. A bold statement, sure, but one that was quickly placed into context when he illustrated it with one of the top existential questions to date, “When you close the fridge, does the light really go off?”

Without that light being connected to an indicator, how do we know it is working efficiently? How can we work to transform it to make it work better?

Similarly, connectivism is critical for digital transformation to become a key catalyst in any organization’s growth. How can we drive new technologies that are designed for the experience of those who use it, the end users?

Read Computer Weekly article: Why businesses should tackle the digital workplace

This question was at the core of many conversations and sessions at the Gartner Digital Workplace Summit this year, and one that UBS has answered with workspace analytics.

UBS: In the Spotlight at the Gartner Digital Workplace Summit

During his session, Ryan Purvis from UBS shared the Swiss giant’s unique take on how they work to provide their virtual desktop users with an excellent end-user experience using gamification and workspace analytics.

How? Using SysTrack, Lakeside Software’s workspace analytics tool, UBS provides their end-users with data on their own experiences along with suggestions for how to improve it: from closing out browser windows to when to reboot. From there, end-user experience scores are calculated and UBS departments compete for the best score. UBS also continuously monitors the environment for performance, latency, utilization and a number of other factors to help them continuously optimize the environment and investments for user needs.

Read: Succeed with Workspace Analytics for IT

This year, the conference was the largest Gartner Digital Workplace Summit had seen and on the expo floor, it was evident as to why: organizations are now realizing more than ever what Gartner Research VP Monica Basso urged, “This is the digital workplace and it should be a priority. There is a desperate need for a digital workplace initiative to drive business outcomes.”