Digital experience monitoring and why it is important

To properly grasp what digital experience monitoring (DEM) is all about, we would have to first go back to the definition of DEX. As we previously stated, DEX examines how an employee interacts with his/her digital environment as a whole (whether within the office environment or while working from home) and -more precisely- how they feel about it. The latter part of this definition is what makes DEM stand out from the usual monitoring techniques and solutions used in the workplace today.

Typically, IT teams use a variety of solutions to assess their digital environment (devices, applications and networks) such as Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Network Monitoring, Endpoint Management, among others. For instance, the SolarWinds APM solution is widely used to automate the processes involved in pinpointing performance problems and finding fixes efficiently, so user experience doesn’t suffer from app issues. These tools provide a detailed view on the performance of specific IT components generally within the office premises.

The issue, however, is that these tools are heavily focused on technology and often overlook the individual experience of the end user. For example, metrics such as user adoption, engagement and satisfaction are hard to identify with these tools. This is why we have seen many teams rely on traditional research methods (both quantitative and qualitative) to learn more about their users’ experiences, what causes issues, what are the factors that affect productivity, and more.

Although these research techniques offer a wide variety of useful data, their timing is a bit problematic as they usually push IT teams to be reactive rather than proactive. For example, launching such surveys after an incident has occured is a problem in itself. More often than not, employees would have to wait for a fix (if there is any) which obviously amounts to their frustration that would later turn to increased disengagement and dissatisfaction.

This is when DEM comes into play.

Gartner defines the Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) as a performance analysis discipline that supports the optimization of the operational experience and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, with the application and service portfolio of enterprises… This discipline also seeks to observe and model the behavior of users as a flow of interactions in the form of a customer journey.

A lot to take in from this lengthy definition. But, in short, think of DEM as the glue that groups systems performance data, real-time usage behaviour and user experience trends. Contrary to the above techniques that are rather reactive, DEM acts as a proactive and agile approach that helps in eliminating silos, assessing IT systems, anticipating future issues and optimizing the overall digital experience.