Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For many EUC and Digital Workplace leaders, the challenge with digital employee experience (DEX) isn’t the technology, it’s building alignment. You can see the data. You know where friction exists. You can quantify disruption, productivity loss, and inefficiencies. But you struggle to achieve your targets, because you need buy in from other teams, and right now, they don’t want to hear anything about DEX. Security has different priorities. Application owners are focused on releases.

Generative AI has the potential to transform workplace productivity – but do organizations know how to deliver on that promise? New research shows that employees who use generative AI tools engage with them up to ten times per day, spending over three hours per week interacting with AI at work. And yet within the same organizations, large groups of employees have never meaningfully engaged with these tools at all.

Most IT organizations want to improve the digital employee experience. But good intentions alone rarely move the needle. The real shift happens when organizations evolve how IT operates. Traditional IT operations are built around reacting to incidents. But ticket-based operations, or operations based on poor data, lack the ability to create truly predictive ways of working.

Digital employee experience doesn’t fail because of technology. It fails because of operating models. Many digital workplace leaders invest in visibility tools, dashboards, automation capabilities, and sentiment platforms. And yet, months later, they’re still stuck in reactive mode. Tickets are down slightly. Reporting is better. But the organization hasn’t fundamentally shifted.

Over the past few years, Digital Employee Experience (DEX) has moved from emerging concept to essential capability for modern IT organizations. The conversation has changed. IT is no longer measured only by system uptime or ticket resolution. Today, success is defined by how technology actually performs for employees — and how consistently organizations can deliver productive, friction-free digital work.

Why digital experience is now a regulatory priority In regulated industries like financial services, even minor technology friction can quickly become a regulatory risk. Gaps in visibility, slow systems, and inconsistent performance can trigger audit findings, SLA breaches, and increased compliance scrutiny.

Most IT leaders agree on one thing: digital employee experience matters. What is less clear is how to operationalize it in ways that deliver measurable business outcomes. Many organizations invest in tools and dashboards, launch experience initiatives, and even measure sentiment. But without an operational model that connects employee experience to core business objectives, IT teams often stay stuck in reactive support. DEXOps changes that.

Enterprises have never had more access to artificial intelligence and less certainty about what it is delivering. Generative AI tools now sit inside everyday workflows, embedded across productivity software and operational systems employees rely on for critical work. They generate insight at scale, reveal patterns more clearly than before, and offer earlier visibility into potential risk.

For decades, IT operations have been built around incidents, SLAs, and ticket closure rates. Success has been defined by how quickly tickets are resolved and whether service levels are met. But the modern digital workplace has changed. Employee productivity, digital adoption, collaboration quality, and business performance depend on far more than ticket metrics. A device that “works” but performs poorly still erodes productivity.

A single disengaged employee can cost an organization approximately $2,246 annually. In today’s technology-driven workplaces, that cost increasingly comes from technology friction – the everyday delays, disruptions, and inefficiencies caused by poorly performing tools. “There’s not really any businesses today that are not fundamentally technology businesses now.”⁠⁠Dan Anthony, CIO at FedNow.