Self-healing digital workplace

This has a direct impact on their deliverables and business is adversely impacted. A proactive EUEM tool will autonomously initiate a disk clean-up, memory clean-up, disk defragmentation, and in turn, speed up the system instantaneously.

The best support is the support you don’t need.

As an employee, you need to focus on your work. You are expected to do your job and create value for your company, leverage your talents, work with your colleagues, learn new things, and develop your career. However, you are not supposed to troubleshoot why your computer is slowing down. Neither are you expected to diagnose a connectivity problem because your shared folders are no longer available.

The evolution of the digital workplace, the capacity to collect thousands of data points on your workplace and the use you make of it, and to apply machine learning-driven decisions have opened up a new opportunity to enhance Employee Experience and keep its workplace environment optimal. Self-healing strategies keep your workplace optimal, resolve rising issues before they start to impact your productivity, and prevent you from raising tickets to IT support.

End-user experience monitoring: solutions and use cases

Several vendors on the market provide solutions tagged as EUEM, or end-user experience monitoring, such as Lakeside, Solarwinds or Nexthink, leveraging workplace analytics techniques. The promise of self-healing is to proactively act on situations that can turn into bigger issues down the road.

The most common use case is linked to the resolution of performance issues in your workplace. Entropy has its place in the computing world, and we know that even when using your workplace normally, your machine will eventually face performance issues. Usually, there is not a single reason why your laptop starts to slow down, but good performance is the result of several matching conditions. Resources is the most obvious one, disk space or disk optimization being a common reason for low performance. EUEM tools make it possible to identify disk shortage conditions or fragmentation issues and remotely trigger cleanup activities of temporary files and upgrade packages to keep your disk in good health. Likewise, these tools can enforce a reboot if you haven’t restarted your computer for a long time. Such solutions can help resolve boot-time slowness by removing unused preloaded applications. Other resources that can be monitored and on which resolution policies can be applied are CPU, memory, network bandwidth, or application faults. Application of self-healing strategies can be silent or issue information notices or confirmation requests.

But EUEM solutions do not only focus on performance, but also on the use you make of it. Analytics collected by these tools allows you to understand your use patterns and possibly identify resources that could be freed up from your computer and given back to your company. A typical use case of use patterns relates to software metering. Employees evolve during their career, the applications they used for their previous activity may not be necessary anymore. Identifying drops in software use and triggering a policy to get software uninstalled or switching to a virtualized application makes it possible to put licenses back in the pool and save money without triggering extra costs.

Good for you, better for your company

A proper mix of self-service support and self-healing solutions to support your workplace environment has several benefits. As an employee, such solutions allow you to stay focused on your work and provide behind-the-scenes mitigations before your workspace reaches its limits. Combined with a persona-based approach, where we identify use patterns according to employee profiles or jobs, this can even become a powerful management tool to ensure digital workspace meets the required expectations for various types of users. Differentiated policies can then be applied to personas. For instance, call center employees requiring high usage of VDI or virtual applications will have different usage patterns as highly nomadic users such as sales representatives, where networking and workplace security are of higher importance. EUEM solutions allow for mapping workplaces to personas and present such patterns to workplace management teams who take appropriate action.

Ultimately, leveraging workplace analytics in a persona-based approach provides your company a tool to target continuous workplace improvement actions that benefit an entire population. By fixing once, deploying to many, we enable a virtuous cycle of improvements and limit the needs for device-specific troubleshooting or calls to on-site support workforce.

Keeping your data safe and protecting misuse is mandatory

Proper use of EUEM and self-healing strategies also requires some investigation on how data is collected and processed. In several countries, we need to pay attention to the information of the employee and put in place the necessary controls and safeguards to prevent misuse of the collected information. Workplace analytics provides deep insights into the workplace, but also on its use. This is why they need to be implemented and managed in a structured way and guarantee that the collected data will not be used for any other purpose than maintaining the workplace in good conditions and optimizing its usage. Under no circumstances should such tools be used to police the way you work in your workplace, actual work, or idle times. Therefore, implementing EUEM also requires companies to define and communicate to their employees their code of conduct related to the use of digital workplace data collected and processed by such solutions.

Capgemini’s End-User Services will help you implement and operate effective self-healing solutions

Capgemini helps your company define your Connected Employee Experience transformation strategy, delivers your Digital Workplace transformation, including implementation of EUEM solutions, defines and operates your Connected Workspace, keeps your working environment performant and up to date, combining the power of workplace analytics, AI-driven policies, and the flexibility of an omnichannel, AI-enabled Connected Support service.

Workplace analytics and asset intelligence are at the heart of our Connected Workspace and Connected Support services. We believe Employee Experience is improved when we deliver the appropriate mix of self-healing and self-service support. Keeping your Digital Workplace in good operating condition in the background, supporting your IT needs with a powerful digitally enabled service desk, and mindful that your IT work experience will provide your company with the optimal Connected Employee Experience.

Download our Connected Support brochure here.

Arnaud Bonneville

Expert in Cloud Infrastructure Services

Passionate about end-user computing and digital experience, I have been working for the past 20 years in IT and Telco companies, with a constant focus on end-user experience in service desk transformation, end-user self-service tools, conversational AI chatbots or virtual workplace products.