Digital Employee Experience: Why Government Is Shifting to Proactive IT

In a more granular sense, DEX is a digital infrastructure, a set of tools IT can leverage to measure, analyze and improve how employees interact with technology. It aims to make workplace tech as accessible and available as what people experience in their personal lives.

By unifying fragmented IT, HR and business applications into a single self-service portal, “you’re able to have a uniform experience and meet them where they are,” says Chris Dilley, CTO for state and local government at ServiceNow.

How Does DEX Make Government IT Support More Proactive?

DEX helps IT teams to shift from a reactive to a proactive position in delivering support “through communication, through transparency, through the visibility of all of the applications that they need to do their jobs every day,” Dilley says.

“Nobody likes bad news, but people really do not like bad news and a surprise. Our digital employee experience gives IT the opportunity to know that something potentially is not working — and also it gives them pre-emptive communication,” he says.

In key areas such as public safety and health services, “reliability is key,” says National Association of Counties CIO John Matelski. “One bad customer experience will get more attention than 100 good ones.”

As IT looks to get out ahead of potential issues, “DEX allows the teams to spot patterns, to anticipate problems and intervene — and hopefully mitigate — much earlier in the process,” he says. “It’s reducing downtime and improving overall performance.”

DEX supports a proactive approach by delivering “real-time visibility into system, application and device performance, enabling teams to detect and resolve issues earlier and keep mission-critical services running,” says Matt Kosinski, general manager of technology product sales at IBM.

READ MORE: Observability is the foundation of trust for modern government.

How Can Agencies Automate IT Service Management Workflows?

In order to manage employees’ tech experiences effectively, IT teams need to know what’s going on out there — and be able to address issues fast. To that end, employee experience platforms collect real-time telemetry: “It could be system health or application performance,” Matelski says.

Then, they empower IT to act on that information. ServiceNow DEX for example “connects that endpoint telemetry directly to those IT service management workflows,” Dilley says. “Whatever channel you’re coming in through, you’re going to have the ability to tie those back to what needs to be done.”

That allows agencies to automate routine responses, “generating tickets, prioritizing incidents, even resolving issues, typically without manual intervention,” Matelski says. “IT teams are always stretched in government, so that kind of integration is critical. It gets rid of the repetitive work, improves response time and ensures a more consistent approach to issue resolution.”

All this, in turn, “allows agencies to prioritize remediation based on operational impact, reduce service disruptions and ensure staff remain focused on delivering reliable services to citizens,” Kosinski says.

How Can Agencies Manage Devices Across Hybrid Workforces?

State and local governments need to support a large, hybrid workforce. That means IT needs the ability to proactively manage those devices.

With DEX operating across a broad landscape of devices, “you’ll know what types of things are critical and also what the dependencies are that one may have on the other, to ultimately keep businesses up and operational,” Dilley says.

Kosinski points to an example from the New York Power Authority, which tapped DEX to help IT manage a sprawling device footprint.

“By establishing a single source of operational truth across 60,000-plus assets and vehicles, they improved visibility for both field and office teams, reduced downtime, enhanced maintenance planning, and increased worker productivity,” he says.

LEARN MORE: Advancements ease hybrid work for government employees.

What DEX KPIs Resonate With IT and Agency Leaders?

To get maximum impact from DEX, it’s important for IT leaders to establish key performance indicators. “You have to tie the technology and the performance to real-world outcomes,” Matelski says.

“Traditional metrics like uptime and system performance are still important,” he says. But with DEX, “the emphasis really needs to be on employee experience. That means looking at mean time to resolution: If something was taking two hours to fix, hopefully now you’re able to do it in much less time, or maybe even prevent an issue from arising.”

Dilley points to self-service incident deflection as an important metric: people going to a knowledge base to find ready solutions to their issues. IT will also want to track change time.

“If we say we’re going to upgrade this particular application, our predicted downtime for that change to be implemented is 30 minutes,” he says. If DEX brings that down to 15 minutes, that’s a measurable outcome.

How Can Resource-Constrained Agencies Support DEX?

For agencies operating under tight budget constraints and limited staffing, change management matters. DEX makes things easier, but it also asks people to do things differently.

“You need to make sure that people understand why we’re doing this, and why this is going to drive a different type of experience,” Dilley says.

It makes sense to start with targeted efforts. “The objective is not to pursue large-scale transformation all at once, but instead to focus on the most strategic points of friction that directly impact employees and citizens,” Kosinski says.

That might mean piloting DEX tools within a single department, “or maybe it’s a single function across multiple departments, like reducing help desk tickets or improving login times,” Matelski says. “Once you get a quick win, you can build on those early successes and scale it strategically.”