Studies consistently show that a positive UX (user experience) drives revenue growth, repeat business and brand loyalty. Here’s a good example: in Robert Pressman’s book Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, he writes “For every dollar spent to resolve a problem during product design, $10 would be spent on the same problem during development, and multiply to $100 or more if the problem had to be solved after the product’s release.”

With employees depending on web applications every day, you can’t risk leaving anything to doubt when it comes to managing your IT estate. Although technology performance might appear “in the green” from IT’s perspective, how often are employees experiencing application outages or slowdowns you’re not aware of? Are they using that highly touted new app you rolled out – or avoiding it because of hidden usability problems?

After more than a year of remote work and video meetings, most people are ready to bid farewell to the days of collaborating with colleagues through their computer screens. Not so fast. The approaching end to the pandemic doesn’t mean an end to telecommunication as the primary form of workforce collaboration. According to a recent study: While some companies have embraced remote work as the new normal, most businesses are preparing for a hybrid workplace.

Every IT environment is different. Some depend heavily on an efficient reactive support team, others need to manage a totally decentralized workforce, while some focus their resources on an infallible security and compliance team. Whatever your IT ecosystem looks like, you need to make sure you are taking into account the things that matter most to you, your IT department and your business at large.

Although IT teams are called upon to deliver a lot these days, I doubt many are being asked to solve the type of post-2020 (read: weird) hybrid work scenarios depicted below. IT support tends to stick to its ‘bread and butter,’ they focus on things like network connectivity, application performance, cybersecurity, or onboarding for new hires—to name just a few.

After more than a year spent working from home, plenty of employees are actually excited to return to the office and see their colleagues face-to-face. But that excitement will quickly fade when they realize they have no place to sit. While some businesses will be staying fully-remote after the pandemic, others are preparing for a new era of hybrid work, where staff will split time between home and the office.

Employee experience is one of the fastest growing IT markets today, and adoption of EX solutions is exploding. Every organization is competing on the strength of its workforce, which brings new urgency to questions like: These questions are at the heart of the employee experience market. But the market itself can be confusing. What is employee experience? What is an EX solution? There’s no standard definition and the term is often used in very different ways.

What does a productive digital workplace look like? For many companies, that question isn’t easy to answer. Even before 2020, enterprise business leaders have been exploring the many benefits of bolstering their digital workplaces with smart technologies and IT practices. That last figure is particularly revealing: almost all businesses are aware of the importance of digital workplaces, but less than half are taking steps to create an effective one.