Are CIOs taking the lead in defining corporate culture?

September 26, 2022 | TAGS: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, DEX, OPEN TALENT

There is an oft-quoted Chinese proverb: “May you live in interesting times” (which has been reported as being both a curse and a blessing.) For anyone managing infra this box is definitely checked. And perhaps it’s about to be doubly checked as we consider this salient fact: delivering employee delight has now seemingly been added to the IT mantra of keeping the enterprise workforce protected and productive.

Think about it. Until recently the daily work experience was influenced by the culture created by the people recruited and trained by HR (and to a lesser extent by the amenities of the office itself). Today so much of how an enterprise is experienced is through the digital engagement served up by the IT department and led by the CIO.

The short-hand for this is DEX (Digital Employee Experience) and while what it looks like is rapidly morphing as end points proliferate and the nature of a work force evolves, it’s rare that additional funds are budgeted to make it happen. Which is unfortunate, because there’s a lot at stake.

A recent Forbes article by Callum Adamson, Co-Founder and CEO at Distributed, touted the era of open talent – necessitating “getting the most out of a range of people, each of whom has a different relationship with your company.” And this also means varying sensibilities and expectations about what a sublime digital experience entails. (And of course, with every talent transition, IT adds another cycle of user provisioning and deprovisioning to the “get done” list.)

DEX fundamentals focus on making employee engagement with technology seamless by identifying and immediately addressing any issues. Achievement of this relies upon tools to provide insights and initiate action whether it be automated intervention, human action, or behavioral change.

The DEX holy grail is the elimination of all digital friction while personalizing the experience to support an employee’s unique work mode preferences. Of course, personalizing the digital engagement experience for each employee adds several orders of difficulty for IT departments. Especially when budgets are tight.

Legacy laden infra meets mobile-first expectations

A challenge for many enterprises is the cold, hard fact that the existence of legacy solutions creates enduring negative experiences for employees. Digital friction can include problems accessing or running required applications, laptops crashing or running slowly, disruptive software updates, and time and productivity lost when IT must remotely access devices to resolve issues.

Meanwhile, the talent pool is having these wonderful personalized customer experiences delivered on their phones.

IT teams are painfully aware of how stark the contrast can be: in their world incident resolution can take hours not minutes. And such delays are understandably deemed intolerable by the person trying to get work done.

What’s also clear that if CIOs and their teams could proactively get ahead of these incidences -- with a focus on service availability -- that would be a huge leap toward delivering the sort of experience that digital workers have come to expect.

The easy solution to move everything to the cloud isn’t entirely easy.

Factors such as service reliability, scalability, ease of updates, and security are among the most common reasons to favor a cloud-based or hybrid solution as a giant step toward proactive incident response.

According to Gartner, by 2025 85% of organizations will be cloud-first-motivated in large part by mandates to avoid the technical debt of aging legacy systems. But as is always the case in infra management, change creates challenge: adopting cloud apps can create silos – making it more difficult for IT to manage and interrupting the user experience.

The goal posts are already moving. Cue predictive remediation.

Pioneering CIOs and their teams are at work right now delivering on a new DEX vision: one in which the IT department has the necessary visibility and automation tools to predict glitches and address them in a self help/self heal manner way before human intervention is required.

Their new mantra is ever-on, 100% predictable service delivery. And the potential impact on an organization’s competitive advantage is enormous. Consider these findings from from Adobe’s State of Work 2021 report (conducted in the U.S.)

• 49% of knowledge workers say they will leave a company out of frustration with technology.


• The number of people who report turning down a job because the tech was out of date or hard to use rose 12 points from the prior report.


• Conversely, the number of knowledge workers who reported applying for a job because they heard a company’s employees use great technology increased by 7 points from the prior report.

With the race for talent hotter than ever, these statistics are truly eye-opening and it’s likely not a stretch to imagine they wouldn’t be hugely dissimilar if the research were conducted globally.

Operational optimization: Generating sufficient cost savings to fund DEX transformation.

We kicked off this topic with the assertion that while CIOs are held accountable for evolving the standard of digital delight experienced by their workforce, they typically aren’t given additional budget to accomplish this. Which means the existing IT budget must stretch further to achieve a high level of DEX.

The good news is that it’s often the case that already-planned system upgrades that are part of overall digital transformation programs will 1) contribute to a modernized employee experience; and 2) generate some cost savings that can be applied to acquiring the analytics, visualization, and automation capabilities that enable the journey from reactive whack-a-mole to proactive response to predictive remediation.

And of course, there are the broader fiscal impacts that scale when the CIO and team are delivering the highest level of business service availability: all digital workers are more productive; a higher caliber of talent is recruited and retained (see Adobe study); the enterprise enjoys an enhanced competitive stance in the market. (One would hope that these wins would result in additional future budget for the CIO.)

Whew…that’s a lot of impact from incremental improvements to DEX. Which brings us to the final point on this topic…

The CIO and the softer side of DEX

Team IT doesn’t need to go it alone. While your dashboards can tell you a lot about progress made against your enterprise’s DEX goals, it’s also smart to send out quick surveys to digital workers to assess how their impressions of improvement are tracking with what your dashboard reflects.

And don’t hesitate to educate the workforce -- specifically about how hybrid work modes are a big factor in end-point proliferation and the heightened risk of security breach. This insight would hopefully shape their response if there’s a slight delay in log in or access to apps. It’s not a bad thing to pull back the curtain a bit to help the broader digital workforce mentally walk in your shoes.

Last of all, don’t stint on the experience of your own team!

In early 2022 McKinsey published “The CIO agenda for the next 12 months: Six make-or-break priorities” #3 of the priorities noted is “Make developer experience the cornerstone of talent strategy.” To this end, we’d recommend applying McKinsey’s recommendations to the entirety of a CIO’s team and implementing the following:

• creating an environment of “psychological safety” where issues can be raised quickly


• actively soliciting input from team members


• creating an atmosphere where they are cared about as individuals as well as employees,


• providing world-class tools to make their work lives easier.

To build on McKinsey’s POV, make the quality of the IT employee experience a primary metric on your DEX dashboard. Given the outsized impact each IT team member has on company culture, you want them pretty darn delighted themselves.

A lesson learned: Microland’s own DEX journey.

We chatted with three leaders of Microland’s Digital Workplace Services practice about their own experience defining, delivering, and refining the digital experiences of 5000+ Microlanders around the world. Now keep in mind, these are the very same 5000+ Microlanders who every day are ”Making digital happen” for global enterprises in dozens of industries. When it comes to their own devices and apps, they are discerning consumers of technology.

What’s inspiring us right now.

For this issue of Microland Monday, we asked some of the younger Microlanders where they are finding inspiration. These two responses are representative of a thoughtful contemplation of life well-lived.

From Deepankur, senior director of customer service, “From Khalil Gibran to Rumi, the words are the most important things that inspire me and move me to introspection and out of the box thinking. It’s not about just absorbing what you get from others but also about sharing it with the larger community. The agenda that drives me always is making the world a better place to live by keeping ‘humanity first.’

“I also enjoy gaining knowledge from older and younger generations. The younger generation is passionate; the older generation brings experience and balance to life. How one puts that to use in life is an art which I thoroughly enjoy.”

From Disha, talent manager lead, “I recently started reading this book ‘The Midnight Library’. Soon after, the movie, ‘Everything everywhere all at once’ popped up on my radar. It’s a new release. I highly highly recommend both.

“Both follow the same theme of choices, multiple lives lived by the main character, regrets with their current life –culminating into a singular understanding that nothing really matters but so does every single little choice. Overall, attachment with what you consider sacrosanct in your life - might not be all you think it is, or at the same time might be an attachment that spans across multiverses.

“As of late this book and movie have been providing me with much needed clarity and grounding.”

You heard it here, first.

Because it is germane to the topic of DEX, we wanted to share that Microland has a digital transformation offering that is free to qualified enterprises.

Our Strategic Costs + Performance Management (SCPM) deliverable is a guided roadmap designed to transition a legacy-laden enterprise to a state of digital agility over the course of about 24 months while generating savings of 25% - 35% and achieving FCR rates that best the Gartner-cited industry average by 10%.

These cost savings are achieved through the activation of five reduction levers: Standardization, Automation, Cost of Leakage, Right Sourcing, Strategic Delivery of Management Information

Working closely with a core IT, operations, and HR team within an organization we spend 4 - 8 weeks developing a customized working road map at no cost and requiring no commitment. We will even bring in third-party sources to validate the approach and predicted savings generated.

Additional resources:

This HBR article is a go-to for Microlanders: 4-steps-to-boost-psychological-safety-at-your-workplace. The article explains why it is challenging to foster the confidence that candor and vulnerability are welcome in a workplace environment while also providing pointers for success.

Gartner provides recommendations for Infrastructure and Operations leaders in this article Three Levels of Employee Engagement for I&O to Deliver Excellent Experiences specific to designing a multichannel engagement approach to gaging employee sentiment about I&O/s services.