Providing a superior digital employee experience increases productivity, boosts morale, and delivers business value from IT investments. Organisations that fail to deliver; risk productive and financial cost to the business—for example the average UK worker loses over two weeks a year due to technology trouble. So what are the steps required to build a comprehensive view of your IT experience quality and enable a pro-active, continuous improvement path? This session explores approaches and real examples proven to effectively measure, manage, and benchmark IT experience from a business perspective to align with the guiding principles of ITIL 4, in order to help shift from traditionally IT-focussed SLAs to metrics that more fully encompass end-users.

1. What’s Your Score?
Using XLAs to quantify service
experience
Dave D’Agostino
Nexthink

2. The ideal world of an End-user
Source: Forrester Research, Dec. 2017, “Engineer Your Technology Environment To Improve Employee Productivity And Flow” by David K. Johnson

3. Why is being in the Flow Zone important?
• In a state of flow, people perform at their best
• Flow is restorative and drives an upward spiral
• Interruption-driven work environments lead to lower-quality decisions and reduce speed
on complex tasks.
In high-complexity knowledge
work, such as engineers,
systems analysts, and project
managers, those ‘in-flow’ are
127% more productive than
average performers.
Distracted workers tend to skip
or put off tasks with high value,
like planning and problem
solving
Source: Forrester Research, Dec. 2017, “Engineer Your Technology Environment To Improve Employee Productivity And Flow” by David K. Johnson

4. Companies with engaged employees
enjoy 81% higher customer
satisfaction and 103% improvement
in employee turnover.
Source: James K. Harter, Frank L. Schmidt, and Theodore L. Hayes, "Business-Unit-Level Relationship Between
Employee Satisfaction, Employee Engagement, and Business Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis," Journal of Applied
Psychology, April 2002

5. However, the reality might be different
Source: Forrester Research, Dec. 2017, “Engineer Your Technology Environment To Improve Employee Productivity And Flow” by David K. Johnson

6. 90 percent of surveyed executives
said end users struggled with
business-technology problems they
“have no way to detect.”
The result? Workers don’t believe IT can assist them and in many cases
will only make things worse.
Forrester: Technology Adoption Profile, 2014

7. What is his
experience ?

8. Step 1: Get a complete view of your Service

9. In the
country of
the blind,
the one-eyed
man is king
Eye T Guy

10. Service
Where does the service start?
Storage
Network
Storage
Power
Power Web Server
Data
Center

11. Where does the service stop?
Storage
Network
Storage
Power
Power Web Server
Data
Center

12. Storage
Network
Storage
Power
Power Web Server
Data
Center
User ?

13. Storage
Network
Storage
Power
Power Web Server
Data
Center
User Location Device App Port Server Domain
80% of security threats
50% of performance issues
70% of support issues
70% of all IT initiatives
Avoidable spend of
$500+/year/user

14. Storage
Network
Storage
Power
Power Web Server
Data
Center
User
Location Device App Port Server Domain

15. Storage
Network
Storage
Power
Power Web Server
Data
Center
User Location Device App Port Server Domain
SLA
XLA
➜Performance
➜Behavior
➜Compliance
➜Experience
➜Sentiment
➜Communication

16. Step 2: Step out of the process comfort zone

18. OPERATIONS
Idea Demand
Project
TestRisk Release Change Incident Problem
Resource
Cost
Know-
ledge
GRC
SDLC
SLA
Vendor
APM
Service Pipeline Service Catalogue
Service Design Package
Finance
Service
Contract
Auto-
mation
Service
Mapping
Model
Surveys
Service Health
• Operational
Reports
• SLA
• Capacity
• NPS
• Financial
• Compliance
• Bang/Buck
Service Maturity
• Availability
• %Auto Change
• Resilience
• Alignment
• Forecast
• Agility
Request
CMDB
Asset
Continual Service Improvement

19. • Over
Optimisation
– “I want the
same tools that
worked for me
last time, but
shinier”
OPERATIONS
Change Incident Problem
Know-
ledge
SLA
Service
Surveys
Service Health
• Operational
Reports
Service Maturity
• NONE

20. … doomed to keep making the same mistakes
Record
• Low capture rate
• Incomplete Data
• Inaccurate data
• Unclear &
subjective
Classify
• Mis-Categorized
• Bad Assignment
• Ping Pong
• Hard to prioritize
• Lack of Facts
Investigate
• Excessive onsite
• No insight into
device behavior
• No sight of services
consumed
• No History
• Unnecessary
escalations
Resolve
• Low reuse of
previous fixes
• Manual and time
consuming
resolution
procedures
• Low adoption ➝
knowledge
Close
• Lack of user
feedback
• Inaccurate and
incomplete CSAT /
NPS

21. Behold the Incident Process
Record
• Low capture rate
• Incomplete Data
• Inaccurate data
• Unclear & subjective
Classify
• Mis-Categorized
• Bad Assignment
• Ping Pong
• Hard to prioritize
• Lack of Facts
Investigate
• Excessive onsite
• No insight into
device behavior
• No sight of services
consumed
• No History
• Unnecessary
escalations
Resolve
• Low reuse of
previous fixes
• Manual and time
consuming
resolution
procedures
• Low adoption ➝
knowledge
Close
• Lack of user feedback
• Inaccurate and
incomplete CSAT /
NPS
MTBF
MTTR

23. Step 3: We can’t fix what we can’t see

24. Reactive
Proactive
4
incidents
72 Users experienced
101 crashes in 7 days
3266 devices exposed to
same issue
Issue 3: We can’t fix what we can’t see

26. Step 4: Jaw, Jaw

27. Surveys

29. But we all knew this, right?

30. It’s not as if we didn’t already know this stuff
The most important IT monitoring tools are those that measure the end user experience
IT Skeptic Blog, August 2008
In some ways ITIL gives us an unhealthily inward view of IT service - it's not truly customer
oriented.
IT Skeptic Blog, October 2010
ITIL is clearly still a body of knowledge written by IT geeks for IT geeks and focused inward on IT
IT Skeptic Blog, May 2011

32. LOBs focused on
business needs
LOBs strive for new
ways to stay
competitive
CFO needs to restrict
spending
Difficult to articulate IT
value
Inconsistent service
delivery
Lack of understanding
of service costs
CIO
Can IT leaders deliver what the business needs?
BUSINESS IT
Competency
Contribution
Credibility

33. BUSINESS
IT

34. BUSINESS
IT
CIO

35. OPERATIONS
Idea Demand
Project
TestRisk Release Change Incident Problem
Resource
Cost
Know-
ledge
GRC
SDLC
SLA
Vendor
APM
Service Pipeline Service Catalogue
Service Design Package
Finance
Service
Contract
Auto-
mation
Service
Mapping
Model
Surveys
Service Health
• Operational
Reports
• SLA
• Capacity
• NPS
• Financial
• Compliance
• Bang/Buck
Service Maturity
• Availability
• %Auto Change
• Resilience
• Alignment
• Forecast
• Agility
Request
CMDB
Asset
Continual Service Improvement

36. Visibility BudgetRisk
Strategy: Demand and Portfolio Management
The two areas that have become most important to UEM over the
past three years are application performance and portfolio
planning and optimization, which were tied for first place.
Putting the user into user experience management can provide
insights into:
■ What's being used and what's not?
■ And to what effect?
■ What are the business outcomes?
■ What business processes are enhanced? Which are slowed?
■ And at what cost to business performance?
Dennis Drogseth, EMA: Putting the "User" into User Experience Management. April 2018

37. Visibility BudgetRisk
v
Multi-
region
support
Poor decision
support
v
Lack of accuracy
Poorly
informed
decisions
vInaccurate
scoping
vImpacted
functions/ users
vStarting the
program right
vWrong
assumptions
v
Reconciling
multiple
data
sources
v
Continually
changing
environment
v
L1 & 2 poor
understandin
g of users
vAccurate
service
mapping
v
Documented
configuration vs
actual usage
vOver budget Constrain
ts
Project
overruns
Accurate
scoping &
execution
Allocatio
n
Innovatio
n
restricted
Increasing
cost of
operational
IT
ChangevSecurity
vReality of
current state
vAccurate
scope of issue
vUser behaviour
Fraud & Error
vAudit & usage
vContract
breaches/
exposure
vActual
usage
vImpact of
changes
vPositi
ve
v
What’s
changed due
to the change?
vNegati
ve
vOut of context feedback
(currently via incident/ ticket
volumes)
Personal
Status –
Their
reputation
Autonomy –
Their power
& ability to
act
Strategy: Demand and Portfolio Management

38. “XLA records goals from an end user perspective and connects these goals with the
improvement and delivery of IT products
and services. Building XLA starts with the targeted end result and reengineers back to a
relevant way of working and set of agreements”
Source Giarte https://giarte.com/what-is-xla/
“Research shows that customer satisfaction and the
customer experience is becoming increasingly relevant with
the industry, which has led to the hypothesis
that Experience Level Agreements (XLA) will become more
common place in the near future.”
Source: the Service Desk Institute
“ELA is a special type of SLA
designed to establish a
common understanding of
the quality levels that the
customer will experience
through the use of the
service, in terms that are
clearly understandable to
the customer and to which
he or she can relate”
Source ResearchGate.net
“While SLAs remain a critical facet of IT services, there’s an
emerging need for experience level agreements (XLAs or
also abbreviated ELA) that focus on what services
employees are consuming and how improved service can
help drive business value”
Source: Nexthink
“In a truly digital
world when IT
and the business
are truly as one
the customer
experience is
“the metric” as
poor experience
will lead to loss
of Business”
Source: Tony Price
Virtual Clarity