A new era of work: How AIOps and Unified Observability can take DEX to new heights

Businesses are in the early stages of a new era of employee relations as both the workplace and the workforce undergo significant changes. The pandemic accelerated the shift to hybrid work environments, which has, in turn, accelerated the ongoing digital transformations that made hybrid work possible in the first place. Meanwhile, baby boomers are retiring, Millennials are moving into management, and the Gen Z cohorts are just starting their careers.

The digital natives now populating companies have discriminating expectations for how technology works for them. For example, Riverbed’s Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Survey found that 68 percent of employees would leave the company if they were unhappy with the DEX. Companies that fail to provide seamless DEX -- which covers the full range of how employees engage with technology at work, from an intranet to email and collaboration platforms to HR systems -- risk frustrating employees when things do not work as expected. This not only increases the chances employees may look for another employer, but a faulty DEX brings losses in productivity and potential damage to a company’s reputation.

AIOps Improves Employee Experience Analytics

One approach that can help companies significantly improve DEX and build loyalty among their workforces and customers is incorporating AIOps into their IT strategies. Artificial intelligence and machine learning models can ingest and correlate data from multiple data sources and collection methods across an organization’s ecosystem and perform advanced analytics to identify performance trends, detect anomalies and provide insights with the relevant context for IT to quickly resolve issues. AIOps integrated with Unified Observability platforms that process high-fidelity data lead to more accurate DEX insights, leading to better employee and customer outcomes.

Resolving Issues Before They Hit the Help Desk

Navigating a service request can be a slow process for IT teams. Different monitoring systems have their own alerts, and the volume of alerts can be overwhelming for a Service Desk agent. Manually gathering diagnostic information on an alert can take a significant amount of time.

Using intelligent automation, AIOps takes a streamlined approach to incident response and remediation. Intelligent automation can not only replicate advanced investigative processes to detect root causes but also remediate issues by modeling decisions like an expert. In this case, an issue is resolved before a ticket is created and a human intervenes. If an issue remains unresolved, Unified Observability  solutions that integrate with ITSM can intelligently create a service ticket, assign the right priority and send the ticket to the right person or team at the Service Desk, with the right context,to resolve the issue. For example, Observability solutions with AIOps capabilities can determine the root cause of a connection issue to a specific wireless device and end user. It can also raise the priority of a problem if it involves broad network issues.

With intelligent automation, AIOps not only finds and resolves issues more quickly, it also prevents issues, driving down the volume of Service Desk Tickets.  Proactive remediation not only improves the user experience, but also frees up time for IT who are increasingly short-staffed and in reactive mode.

Boosting Employee Happiness and Productivity

The realities of today’s workplace are not lost on business and IT leaders. In the survey, 91 percent of decision-makers said they need to provide more advanced DEX to meet employee expectations and that failing to do so would harm the company. The goal of providing seamless DEX sounds fairly simple: Companies need to mitigate IT issues quickly and integrate applications and devices so workers can stay productive without encountering interruptions. Employees, especially GenZ and Millennial employees, expect a good digital experience -- and even demand it.

Understanding the full picture of the employee experience is paramount to incident prevention. DEX solutions that correlate both high-fidelity performance data and qualitative data such as employee feedback, provide an early warning indicator of emerging IT issues. Observability platforms that provide  aggregated end user experience insights based on application and device performance data and human reactions, serve as a cultural catalyst for increased employee retention, productivity, and engagement.

Providing Actionable Insights Through Unified Observability

Observability provides the context that allows AI to provide accurate and actionable insights. AI-driven automation that ingests and correlates data across operational and tools silos can solve more complex problems without human intervention. If human intervention is required, observability solutions provide teams with the necessary context to rapidly remediate issues.

Many enterprises are now integrating AI-chatbots that utilize large language models (LLM) to provide a human-centric lens in delivering rapid insights to accelerate IT incident management workflows. 

Using full-stack observability for a complete view of how everything is connected, AIOps delivers automated insights, root cause analysis, incident prevention and advanced correlation. Observability and AIOps provide context, giving human operators actionable insights when human intervention is required.

Looking Ahead

The IT landscape has become incredibly complex, and IT teams are looking for technology to help short-staffed IT teams identify problems before they become service desk tickets. IT teams are turning to Unified Observability and AIOps to model decision-making like an expert in the field and use AI/ML to better predict when incidents will occur. An evolving hybrid workplace and new generations of employees have made delivering excellent DEX more crucial than ever to a company’s ability to perform. AIOps integrated with Unified Observability can detect and resolve IT issues before they become a problem, streamlining the employee and customer experience, while providing cost savings to the company. It’s an integral next step to succeeding in the new business environment.

Image credit: Momius/depositphotos.com

Payal Kindiger is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Riverbed Technology. You can follow her on LinkedIn.