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.
As a Nexthink V6 Customer, you’re already realizing the power and value of a proactive, Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management solution: more productive employees, reduction in employee issues, and a smoother, more accelerated time-to-resolution for employee-reported IT issues.
The first time I was introduced to a real, proper PC was in the early 90’s: my uncle’s work PC, which I used instead to play games. In fact, my first experience with any kind of tech support service was when I phoned the Codemasters help line after getting stuck on a particularly knotty puzzle in the game ‘Dizzy’. No matter how loudly I shouted into the phone, the machine continued to route me back to the beginning of its automated script.
The fast-paced adoption of digital workplace technologies provides fantastic opportunities to improve digital employee experience (DEX). But it comes at a cost. Digital technology has a serious—and increasing—impact on our environment, with a carbon footprint of about 4% of global carbon emission (that’s more than the aviation industry’s 2.5% contribution).
Mean time to innocence (MTTI) is a term used by IT teams to prove that their respective domain is not the source of a particular issue. In other words, it’s a fancy term to avoid blame when something goes wrong. Each team has its own domain-specific tools to prove the issue is not their fault. With respect to desktop virtualization, here are just some of the domains that are relevant when diagnosing issues.
If you were to put 100 enterprise tech leaders in a room together and ask them if they think their company’s employee experience is dependent upon IT, I’m certain all would agree it is. But I’m also certain those 100 wouldn’t know: For IT decision-makers, the devil is in the details. Many are judged by uncompromising Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and shoddy survey data, not comprehensive digital experience trends and indexes.
Modern CPUs are complex beasts with billions of transistors. This complexity in hardware brings indeterminacy even in simple software algorithms. Let’s benchmark a simple list traversal. Does the average node access latency correspond to say, a CPU cache latency? Let’s test it! Here we benchmark access latency for lists with a different number of nodes. All the lists are contiguous in memory, traversed sequentially, and have a 4 KB padding between the next pointers.
