Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

David Paul is the Director of the IT Service Desk at TRC Companies, Inc.—a leading consulting, engineering, and construction management firm that provides technology-enabled solutions to the power, oil & gas, and environmental & infrastructure markets. David has over 25 years of IT service delivery and infrastructure experience, and he was one of the key figures to lead his company’s shift to remote work during the pandemic.

For companies of all sizes, the struggle to understand and improve digital employee experience (DEX) is nothing new. What is new, however, is the working landscape we’ve all been navigating since the pandemic—where remote work has become the norm, and where the employee experience has become almost exclusively digital. As a result, businesses have implemented significant strategic changes over the past several months.

Monday, long regarded as the worst day of the week, made good on its reputation for several thousand Slack users a few weeks ago. What started as an initial server problem at Slack during the wee hours of October 5th, devolved into a performance outage that impacted users for more than six hours.

If you mentioned the word “Green IT” to tech support twenty years ago you probably would have been met with a blank stare. Climate change always felt like a conversation for somebody else—not those in charge of resetting our passwords or installing Office. But while innovations in cloud computing and business applications have helped IT cut infrastructure costs and remain competitive, that progress has come at an environmental cost.

For the digital workplace team at ABN AMRO, it wasn’t just the COVID-19 crisis itself that was unexpected. If you’d have told us in January 2020 that – within a few months – our tooling and capability would be the subject of direct and regular attention by the board at our company, we would have had trouble believing that, too. ABN AMRO has long had quite a special focus on employee experience in general.

The head of AXA IM’s proximity services discusses the importance of creating a digital experience during the lockdown in France. I remember a discussion I had with a senior manager at AXA Investment Managers (AXA IM) right at the beginning of what in France has been termed the “confinement” – or “lockdown” in the UK.

Our customers often stress the phenomenal power that comes from the integration of Nexthink and ServiceNow. Bernardo Ramos, for example, former Director of IT for Arkema, saw their integration as a way of getting real-time information on all their workstations automatically and without effort. “With ServiceNow I had the feeling of having something the best of its class,” he told us, shortly before his retirement earlier this year.

Whenever a file transfer, instant messaging, email, or Wi-Fi failed in the office, an employee could stand up and walk over to deliver the message in person. It certainly didn’t grind their workday to a halt. But as organizations have grown globally, so has their reliance on digital collaboration—the critical tools and services that enable employees to remain productive when working together.

Higher education is one of the many sectors facing the prospect of profound reorientation in the post-COVID-19 world. Following the government’s re-evaluation of approach, which saw students awarded predicted grades at A-level, many university leaders are concerned that taking on the extra, successful students would mean a stretch to resources – especially with social distancing and remote learning requirements needed to manage the spread of the virus.

For us, IT is a place where people genuinely try to “walk the walk.” Many in this industry are perceptive and curious individuals, constantly on the pursuit for better insights and more efficiency. You cannot survive long in an IT department if you hide behind unmet promises or have an aversion for detail. Facts outweigh opinions, and theories are to be questioned and proven true.