How often have you heard (or perhaps uttered) the phrase “IT-business alignment”? Notwithstanding the fact that IT is part of the business (even with outsourcing, there’s usually a retained IT organization), it begs the question, “How do we know that IT and the business are aligned correctly?”
Corporate IT service management (ITSM) capabilities have traditionally focused on service level agreement (SLA) targets related to factors such as service availability to assess their service delivery and support performance. However, these technical performance metrics don’t always reflect the end-user experience and productivity.
This blog explains how this needs to change and offers practical insights for using employee experience metrics to drive IT strategy.
Questioning the IT metrics status quo
Periodic service reviews and customer satisfaction questionnaires and surveys might provide some insight into these areas. However, there’s still likely a disconnect between what these SLA metrics say and what your organization and its employees think of the IT capabilities they consume. It’s why employee experience metrics are rapidly gaining traction: they provide better insight into how what IT does affects employees and their work, for better or worse. Importantly, not only do experience data and the associated insights better show IT performance, but they also provide data-driven input to continual improvement efforts.
Employee experience metrics should be considered “the missing link” in ITSM. They better show how well IT and business needs are aligned and offer direction on developing IT strategy to further improve your IT organization’s worth to your parent business. A critical point to note is that employee experience metrics provide a clearer picture of IT’s impact on business success rather than simply reporting IT’s efficiency. For example, an incident ticket might be resolved within agreed SLA timeframes. However, the end-user experience is still frustrating and potentially affects business operations adversely.
So, what could your IT organization track (in terms of employee experience)?
Various employee experience (or digital employee experience) metrics are available to your organization. For example, something like a Digital Experience Score (DXS), which combines the speed, reliability, and usability of your IT services.
However, when HappySignals was born over a decade ago (to help IT improvement by addressing the challenges with employee IT experiences), through research and working with our customers, we found that the two key experience metrics that helped all our customers are:
- Happiness Score – end-user satisfaction with IT services using a net promoter score (NPS) approach
- Lost time – the time or productivity end-users perceive they lose due to IT issues.
These two experience metrics have worked for our customers from HappySignals’ very early days.
How can employee experience metrics drive IT strategy?
The short answer is that the experience data provides better insight (versus traditional IT metrics) into how your IT service delivery and support capabilities are enabling your organization – in terms of what is and isn’t working as well as it should (and from an end-user rather than an IT perspective).
Digging deeper into how employee experience metrics will help to drive your IT strategy, the various opportunities include:
- Better aligning IT operations with business outcomes. Experience metrics show how IT operations (and improvements to IT operations) affect workforce productivity. In this respect, the experience data can be considered a proxy for IT’s business value. The data also confirms the need for prioritized improvements, helping IT leaders justify expenditure on experience-driven changes. For example, improving IT self-service to enhance end-user experiences and boost adoption rates using artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
- Identifying IT issues that are missed via traditional IT metrics. We believe that people (your end-users) are the best “sensors” of IT performance, with high volumes of experience feedback identifying the issues that really matter (because they adversely affect business operations and outcomes). For example, our aggregated view of customers’ experience data for 2023 showed high dissatisfaction with enterprise applications. While traditional IT metrics would only likely show that applications meet agreed service-level targets and, unfortunately, the employee issues go unaddressed.
- Driving IT investments in the right places. Whether the investments are new technology projects or experience-driven improvements, experience data and insights allow your IT organization to better understand where changes are needed. Not simply because “there’s a new way” but because there’s a business need or pain point that needs to be addressed. Building on the previous example, if certain enterprise applications are known to be a problematic area for employees (and business operations), investments can be prioritized to address the issues. Experience data also helps prevent improvement initiatives that improve IT operations but, sadly, have negligible positive effects on business operations and outcomes.
- Changing the focus of corporate IT from technology to experience-centricity. This can include a spectrum of elements that rely on experience-based decision-making. For example, creating a culture of (experience-driven) continual improvement or experience-driven technology investment.
Experience data also helps with course correction
An easy way to describe this is to consider the use and benefits of experience data in IT strategy execution. For example, the corporate IT service desk migration from in-house to managed service provider (MSP) provision. The reasons for the change are all understood – such as industry best practice adoption, lower staffing risk, reduced costs, and greater innovation – but there will still likely be a dip in the end-user experience. After all, people often don’t like change (even if it’s expected to benefit them).
Experience data allows your organization (and your MSP) to understand what works with the new arrangements and what doesn’t. Perhaps experience feedback highlights that end-users feel that the outsourced IT service desk lacks business knowledge when prioritizing and resolving issues (as you would expect in a new contract). The experience data allows you to see whether this is a generic concern/issue or limited to certain areas, with remedial action taken to improve the desk’s knowledge, service, and experiences.
If you would like to learn more about how our customers use employee experience metrics to drive IT strategy, get in touch. You may also find the following content beneficial:
