2018 was a banner year for the digital workplace as organizations began to see the positive bottom line impact of investing in the digital experience of their employees. Building on this momentum, 2019 is set to be another monumental year. So, let’s ring in The New Year Nexthink-style! We asked some of the greatest minds in the industry one simple question: what will 2019 bring for the digital workplace and employee experience?

Although technology continues to evolve, the processes that support Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) have remained relatively unchanged for several decades. One of the main challenges to delivering high-quality IT services in this long-established approach is reactivity – that is, focusing on incident management as a means to resolve something that should never have happened in the first place.

With technology’s unrelenting advance, the evolution of the digital workplace has unarguably entered the fast lane. Microsoft – which provides critical digital workplace solutions through their Windows OS – is no exception. Indeed, end users indispensably depend on Microsoft’s range of workplace services to achieve everyday tasks – from simple log-ins to advanced programming – putting them at the front lines of any new updates and modifications.

Patrick, Vincent and myself founded Nexthink because we believed in a future in which IT departments and employees work together to have a great digital experience. At that time, we observed that IT departments were traditionally focused on server, network and applications and often neglected the employee experience as a key driver for success and productivity. At best, organizations were reactive to support users, instead of proactively fixing issues before employees were impacted.

In describing why Nexthink is a critical partner in their value-offering Morten Grønneb?k, Chief Commercial Officer at BusinessNow, said “What we were experiencing as a consultancy company was that SLAs might be green out there, but your customers or end-users’ satisfaction was often red.” Indeed, prior to Nexthink, BusinessNow was increasingly faced with a major issue: clients’ IT departments were blind to IT issues at the end-user level, although data centers seemed oper

In today’s fast-paced working environment, employees tend to rely less and less on IT departments. The use of workplace technology has never before been this accessible and essential and employees are increasingly confident that they can work independently from IT to decide on their own external tools and solutions.

There’s a disconnect between business leaders and IT. As noted by a 2017 Forrester study conducted on behalf of Nexthink, just 36% of business users “think IT is aligned with the needs of the business,” even though technology services are now embedded into every aspect of enterprise culture, from mobile device use to wifi access to cloud computing.

Organizations need better network oversight. According to Information Week, recent data predicts “wasted” cloud spending on services and applications that aren’t fully utilized will reach $21 billion by 2021, while CIO points to Gartner research that suggests 30 to 40 percent of IT spending in large enterprises is actually funding shadow IT.

There’s a job description you don’t see often, but unfortunately, it’s much closer to the truth about what companies are truly looking for these days in an IT manager. Technology has taken over the workplace.