Every workday you open your laptop or start your desktop, and you wait. For some, that wait is a mere blip in the day, a few seconds, for others that wait can seem interminable. A few months ago, our engineering team set out with the task of exploring what variables really impact a slow device performance. During the course of their research, the team uncovered answers to very specific questions like: What is the average startup time for a work device? (Hint: it’s less than five minutes).

‘Power-hungry data centers greedily devour diminishing water supply!’ – This might be my own frequency bias, but I feel like every headline today references data centers and the existential threat they pose to the environment. Perhaps it’s the sensational numbers and estimates that pull me in: So here I am, uncomfortably deep in the rabbit hole, reading about adiabatic processes and wet cooling towers (experts in the U.K.

“Experience is truth.” That was one of the slogans my colleagues and I came up with in our first meeting as the newly-formed Digital Employee Experience team at ABN AMRO, one of the largest banks of the Netherlands. The subtext being that Digital Employee Experience, had to be top of mind for every IT project, even if that meant some unconventional thinking. But we were ready for unconventional.

Recently I got the chance to speak with Neil Keating, Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Bright Horse, a full-service IT experience consulting and training company. Neil’s candor and deep knowledge about IT Operations and digital experience was obvious from the start. Find a brief clip of our conversation here and several helpful nuggets for IT leaders in the text below!

Every year during the holidays, our customer, a multinational professional services organization, has thousands of IT tickets built up due to employees on vacation. As the IT teams reached out and didn’t receive a response, their performance metrics ticked up, impacting their quarterly goals and customer satisfaction. In defense of these employees, we all know what it is like to come back to an overflowing inbox.

According to CEOs of Intel, IBM, Cisco & other major tech companies, the current semiconductor chip shortage will impact price and availability of IT hardware for the next 12 to 18 months. News coverage about the shortage reveals many factors impacting the production crunch, but there is one common underlying issue – many IT departments are updating their asset plans now based on unknown conditions (which I’ll make ‘known’ at the end of this article 😊).

Gathering data doesn’t just help a business understand what’s working and not working. It also shows the way forward, enabling teams to make the right improvements to benefit both the business and the people they serve. And in many cases, the most powerful data a business can collect comes directly from its customers. Here at Nexthink, the UX Research team talks to customers and partners to learn about their goals and challenges.

gRPC is an open-source Remote Procedure Call system focusing on high performance. There exist several gRPC benchmarks including an official one, yet we still wanted to create our own. Why would we torture ourselves doing such a thing? So with those points in mind, we created a completely open-source benchmark where everyone is welcome to contribute and which could be run with a single command, having only Docker as a prerequisite.

Let’s admit something without shame: we love to use new technology. Maybe the latest smart phone, or a new lightweight laptop or tablet that makes it easier to work from anywhere, it’s all fair game. And when we are at our desk, we enjoy creating expansive workspaces with multiple monitors, a full-size keyboard, and other extras. When we look across our household, we might have duplicate, perhaps triplicate resources growing our technology real estate exponentially.

The Nexthink team is excited to announce that we have been recognized in the September 2021, Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’ report. Customers submitted over 150 reviews with an overall star rating of 4.6 (out of 5) and an impressive 4.7 rating (out of 5) for ‘Support Experience’ as of July 2021. Our team at Nexthink takes great pride in this distinction, as customer feedback continues to shape our products and services.