Power of analytics in a digital workplace

Transcript

Stuart Downes:
Well, hello and welcome to the latest in our End-User Services podcast series. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by Rowland Armstrong from Lakeside Software and also by Chandra from our End-User Services Solution team.

So without further ado, my name’s Stuart Downes and I lead the End-User Transformation Services here at Capgemini. Let me give time to, first of all, Chandra, to give a quick introduction.

Chandra M:

Hello. Thanks, Stuart. I am one of the leaders in Capgemini Digital Workplace Solution Community and the majority of my work is around workplace analytics.

Stuart D: 

Thank you, Chandra, and Rowland, please.

Rowland A:

Thank you, Stuart. My name is Rowland Armstrong and I am the global director for the Capgemini alliance between Lakeside and Capgemini. So I welcome this opportunity today to talk to the wider audience about Lakeside’s analytics offering. Thank you, Stu.

Stuart D:

Thanks. So let’s get into the meat of the discussion. We’re going to talk today about the power of analytics in a digital workplace. It’s really important to understand that data gives massive insights into a workplace and to the operation from an IT perspective of end-user services.

So let’s just start off gently and, Rowland, really to you. So we understand the analytics and we understand its usage. Can you explain from the perspective of a workplace why analytics is really important?

Rowland A:

Sure. I mean really the goal of analytics is to aid business by providing real data and not anecdotal evidence. And that real data can be used to make improvements or changes and really replacing the subjective with objective data-driven decision-making.

So circling back to the context of a digital workplace, analytics and also digital experience monitoring plays a very important role in many areas. These could be areas such as user experience and health scoring, productivity and overall IT visibility. What this does, it allows a business to adapt quickly and objectively.

So to summarize, I think analytics is a powerful means to realistically define a desired future state of a digital workplace, which is meeting all of the user’s IT and business requirements together. So in my opinion, analytics acts as the very foundation of the digital workplace offering.

Stuart D:

Thanks, Rowland. That brings us on nicely to bring Chandra in. So Chandra, from your perspective, how should we use the analytics to support the business of our customers and not just the technology?

Chandra M:

That’s a very important question, Stuart, and thanks to Rowland for putting it so nicely.

As a part of the solution community, we get a chance to interact with many of our customers, right? And what we see, we find three main stakeholders when we talk about an enterprise. We have users, we’ve got IT and we have a business. Users today want freedom. They want their workplace as a platform so reliable that it doesn’t break. And if it breaks, then it gets automatically healed.

On the other hand, the business wants to retain their talents. They want to keep employees happy, productive and drive more business outcomes. In between, IT is supposed to meet the demand from the user and the business.

When we look at it, we see that analytics really empowers the digital workplace as a platform to drive and bring experience and happiness to all three major stakeholders. Analytics helps our customer to quantify the perception. There are so many experience elements today that cannot be measured because there is no scientific way to have it quantified. Experience is always evolving and with the help of analytics, we can really improve it, measure it, and deliver the outcome that business is looking for. In order to make the workplace platform, bringing the element of proactiveness, the way how we support and engage with our end-users is the key.

On top of it, analytics drives the automation, the contextual automation, which are really the need of the hour and make the workplace as a platform. So it’s not just about the user and IT. It drives the overall business outcome for the customer.

Stuart D:

There’s two observations that I’d add to that, Chandra, so thank you. That was wonderful.

The first is data itself and I always use the analogy of gold in the hills. Now there’s gold in the hills, but you’re not quite sure where it is unless you’re a geologist. It’s the same with data. So unless you’ve got a way of unlocking the power of the data, i.e., you’ve got some data scientists, what you need really is then specialist tooling to help you identify where the opportunities are within the data.

That’s exactly what products such as Lakeside SysTrack perform. They allow you to quite quickly drill down into the valuable data, gain insights from that data. Then most important, you’ve got a feedback loop. You’ve got to then provide an ability to perform actions, get insights that were based on the data. Really unlocking that is the secret, in my view, to gaining value from analytics in a digital workplace.

Just continuing with, Chandra. So obviously we’re focused on this from a Capgemini perspective. We believe we offer differentiation in the market. Have you got any examples of what you’d feel that we can bring differentiation using analytics in the digital workplace?

Chandra M:

Certainly, Stuart. Thank you for adding insight from the data perspective. I think the majority of the differentiation that we are bringing in our current engagements is with the power of analytics and the visualization that data is bringing for us.

The first and foremost thing, what we are bringing, the difference is helping our customer to design a tailored workplace based on the persona of the end-user. That is possible only because of the data and the analytics, which is performed on top of those. Quoting some of the examples, if we talk about the experience today, experience has undergone a major revolution from the transactional base to actually measuring it scientifically. So we have engaged with many of our customers having issues of a bad perception from the IT, for example, the boot time, for example, the challenges with the adoption.

What we did with the analytics and the data for tools like Lakeside SysTrack, we collect the data and we actually bring the visualization for IT and business, which helps us to reach and improve the real user experience challenge. We bring the sentiment analysis, the prediction, which will, for example, if there is an impact which is supposed to happen in future and with the help of data and the power of analytics helps you to understand it well before it actually impacts the experience and productivity of the end-user.

Also, we have built a dashboard on top of it, which gives the understanding based on persona, based on the geographical distribution of the user, based on the business line, how these experiences, sentiment, adoption, and all those things are working together.

If you allow me to add one more example here from the statistical approach that we follow, not just from the experience and productivity, but also from having a correlation and fine-tuning the process to find the actual root cause that is causing the bottleneck and delays. So with the help of data and analytics, for example, VPN-related issues, for example, laptop boot time, we easily get the insight on the outliers, which then gets processed to find the actual pain points. With the help of analytics, you just don’t fix the problem, but you avoid it to happen in another workstation with this similar sort of configuration and their users in the environment.

Stuart D:

Thanks, Chandra. Now building on that, so we’ve got a good focus there on the value proposition for analytics. Rowland, who’s the typical clients and what are they generally looking to achieve, please?

Rowland A:

Our clients are typically larger organizations, ranging from 3,000 users up to 100,000 users on beyond and from many different industries like finance, heavy industry, manufacturing, public sector. So really analytics and digital experience monitoring cross all verticals today because technology on its own doesn’t deliver transformational outcomes. You have to be able to predict the challenges along the way. You have to be able to foresee roadblocks, you have to be able to adapt to day-to-day problems quickly. That’s really what analytics is trying to achieve.

In the past when we would work with Capgemini, we would try and conform with a variety of service-level agreements around things such as uptime. But service-level agreements don’t really address what Chandra was alluding to, which was things like user satisfaction and user health scoring. So really we’re trying to redefine the service-level agreement into something that we call the XLA or the Experience Level Agreement. This is where we really place the user experience front and center of our digital workplace offerings.

That’s really how we address this new generation of client that is really treating their end-users more as a customer within the organization. So IT has to serve that customer, whether it’s an external customer or an internal customer within the organization.

Stuart D:

Thanks, Rowland. What I would add to that discussion is that’s an experience level and there’s a capability and a scoring that comes through the tooling with SysTrack. What we’ve done at Capgemini is we’ve taken a holistic view so that data is brilliant and helps us to modernize our operations and to improve the reliability of services and improve the performance of our services.

But there’s also a lot of other areas where experience is measured. So we do have an experience measure that we are focused on with our clients and that takes a broader feed of data. It’s looking at data from ServiceNow, it’s looking at sentiment data from our service desk contacts. It’s looking at taking data from our infrastructure systems or the application systems that users and employees of our clients are accessing so we take a very broad view. Then in the end-user space we focus with Lakeside to provide that immediate value on top of all the other analytics.

But really we’re focused on a user experience score. And part of that focus has meant that we’ve really invested in ensuring that our people are ready to help clients transform. In the past month, we learned that we were the very first system integrator to gain a Center of Excellence Certification from Lakeside software. We’re very pleased to have that and that shows our commitment to helping modernize the way our clients deliver services and gain insights from the end-user and really move away from that mindset of a desktop service, so the mindset of a digital workplace service, which is a transition that organizations have been going through and continue on that journey.

So what I’d like to do, just as I close, is, first of all, to say thank you to Rowland, thank you to Lakeside Software for supporting this podcast. Also, thanks to Chandra for joining us with his insights and expertise.

All of our podcasts are available online. You can subscribe to our podcasts through the usual channels, SoundCloud, Spotify. Wherever you usually gain your content, you’ll find the podcasts from Capgemini. So again, thank you for joining us today and please join us again for the next End-User Services podcast.

Rowland A:

Thank you, Stu. It’s been a pleasure talking to Capgemini today. Thank you very much.

Chandra M:

Thank you, Stuart. Thank you, Rowland. It was a good conversation. Thank you.