IT Has Been Measuring
The Wrong Thing.
Your infrastructure dashboards are green. Your employees are still calling IT. That gap, between what your monitoring says and what your people actually experience, is costing your organization in ways you're not currently measuring.
The Numbers Behind the Problem
Independent research by Nexthink and Vanson Bourne, surveying over 3,000 IT leaders and employees at large enterprises, quantifies what practitioners have long suspected. The visibility gap is real, measurable, and growing.
The Reporting Iceberg
More than half of all employee IT issues never reach the service desk. Employees reboot, work around the problem, or simply adapt: and IT never knows it happened.
Nexthink / Vanson Bourne, State of the DEX Industry Report, 2023: 1,000 IT Decision Makers & 1,000 office workers
The Perception Gap
IT leadership and employees are living in different realities. The gap between what IT thinks is happening and what employees actually experience is the core problem DEX programs are designed to close.
Nexthink / Vanson Bourne, Experience 2020 Report: 1,000 IT decision-makers & 2,000 end users across US, UK, France, Germany
When Tech Fails, IT Is the Third Choice
When employees encounter a technology problem, their instinct is to handle it themselves. Formal IT support is a last resort: which is why the service desk only sees a fraction of what's actually breaking.
Nexthink survey of 1,500 employees on behavior when workplace technology fails
The Hidden Productivity Cost
Because roughly half of issues go unreported, IT sizes the problem from only part of the data. Nexthink’s 2020 estimate shows how much the picture changes once unreported issues are counted.
Nexthink, Experience 2020 Report press release (April 2020). Survey by Vanson Bourne; the 100-hour and $25M figures are Nexthink’s estimates. For current figures, use the calculator below.
What Organizations Lose Without DEX
These costs are real. Most of them don't appear on any current dashboard, which is exactly the problem.
Support Costs That Won't Shrink
Service desk volume stays flat or grows despite IT modernization investments. The reason is almost always the same: IT is responding to symptoms instead of causes, because there's no visibility into what's actually happening on employee devices between the moment a problem begins and the moment a ticket is opened. By then, the window for proactive intervention has closed.
Software Investments That Don't Deliver
Microsoft 365 Copilot, collaboration platforms, AI productivity tools: organizations spend significant money on licenses, then discover months later that usage is a fraction of what was projected. Without endpoint-level visibility into whether tools are actually being opened, used, and performing well, there's no feedback loop. You can't course-correct what you can't see.
Productivity Drag That Never Appears
When an employee's laptop runs slow, an application takes 45 seconds to launch, or a video call breaks up every few minutes, they adapt. They work around it. They don't file a ticket. That friction accumulates silently across thousands of devices, subtracting hours of productive work every week without leaving a trace in any IT system. It only becomes visible when you measure at the endpoint.
Talent and Reputation at Risk
Technology experience is part of the workplace experience that decides whether people stay, what they tell their peers, and how clients see them. Organizations cannot credibly promise a great employee experience while the technology experience goes unmeasured. See the talent and reputation case
What Does Digital Friction Cost You?
Enter your own numbers to estimate the productive time and cost lost to everyday technology friction, and what a measurable improvement would return. Defaults come from published telemetry; every assumption is editable.
Estimated annual impact
That is about 39 min per employee, every week.
About 0 departures a year. This is separate from the lost-time cost above and is not added to it. Self-reported reasons for leaving are imprecise, so treat this as a range to discuss with HR, not a forecast. Sources: Adaptavist / Attest (2025), Gallup.
Estimates only, based on published averages from Nexthink, Cracking the DEX Equation (September 2025), which analyzed organizations largely in the early stages of DEX management. Your results will differ. A DEX baseline replaces these assumptions with your own telemetry.
Your Technology Is Part of Your Employer Brand
People judge an employer by the tools it hands them on day one and the tools they fight with every day after. The technology experience shapes whether good people stay, how they talk about the organization, and how clients see the people who represent it.
Sources: Pega / YouGov survey of about 2,600 US and UK working adults (April 2026); Adaptavist / Attest survey of 4,000 knowledge workers in the UK, US, Canada and Germany (August 2025); Gallup, “This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion” (2019).
Turnover Is the Most Expensive Friction
Every resignation brings recruiting fees, onboarding effort, and months of reduced output while a replacement ramps up. Gallup found that 52% of employees who leave voluntarily say their manager or organization could have done something to keep them. Technology friction is one of the most fixable contributors. Unlike pay bands or career paths, it can be measured device by device and improved in weeks.
New Hires Form Opinions in the First Week
A laptop that is ready, accounts that work, and applications that load quickly tell a new hire the organization has its act together. A first week spent waiting for access tells them the opposite, and that impression is hard to undo. DEX makes the onboarding experience measurable by cohort, location, and role, so problems are fixed before the next class starts instead of being discovered in an exit interview.
Clients See Your Technology Through Your People
In professional services, consulting, legal, audit, and advisory work, staff spend their day in front of clients on firm-issued devices. A frozen screen share, a dropped call, or a laptop that will not connect in a client conference room reflects on the firm, not only on the individual. The same holds for any large enterprise whose people meet customers, partners, and regulators. A reliable technology experience is part of how an organization projects competence.
An Employer Brand Needs Evidence
Only 49% of working adults believe their employer provides modern technology (Pega / YouGov, 2026). Many organizations promise a great employee experience in recruiting materials and engagement programs. DEX gives HR and IT shared evidence to back that promise: experience scores by team, office, and persona, sentiment trends, and onboarding metrics that can be reported alongside engagement and attrition.
DEX data does not replace HR analytics. It adds the technology dimension HR has been missing. When attrition rises in one office or team, experience data shows whether technology is part of the story. How HR fits into DEX governance
Infrastructure Health Is Not Employee Experience
These two things measure completely different realities. Conflating them is the root cause of most gap between IT investment and employee outcomes.
What IT Has Been Measuring
- Server uptime and availability
- Network bandwidth and latency at the infrastructure level
- Ticket volume and resolution time: after employees report problems
- Application availability at the application server
- Patch compliance status in management consoles
- Periodic satisfaction surveys: quarterly or annual snapshots
What Needs to Be Measured
- Device performance as the employee experiences it: CPU, memory, boot time, app launch
- Network quality at the endpoint: what the employee's machine actually sees
- Issues detected and resolved before employees feel them: not after they report them
- Application responsiveness as experienced by the user, not the server
- Whether software is actually being used effectively: usage depth, not just license assignment
- Continuous voice of the customer: real-time sentiment linked to real device conditions
Three Shifts That Define Modern IT Delivery
These aren't technology decisions. They're leadership decisions about how IT operates, what it measures, and who it treats as the customer.
DEX Becomes the Operating Model
Digital Employee Experience isn't a tool you buy or a project you complete. It's the methodology and framework through which modern IT organizations deliver technology services. That means experience measurement, continuous feedback, and proactive issue resolution are embedded into how IT operates: not bolted on as a separate initiative.
Organizations that treat DEX as a product category will get limited value. Organizations that adopt it as an operating model will structurally outperform on support efficiency, software ROI, and employee satisfaction.
Experience Is Measured at the Endpoint
The experience of technology lives on the employee's device. Not in the server room. Not in the network operations center. Not in the help desk queue. A laptop that struggles to run a browser and Teams simultaneously is a productivity problem whether or not the infrastructure behind it is healthy: and infrastructure monitoring will never tell you it's happening.
Endpoint-level measurement means continuous telemetry from the actual device: performance, application behavior, network quality as seen from that machine. This is the data source that closes the gap between infrastructure health and employee experience.
Voice of the Customer Is a Required Input
Telemetry tells you what is happening on a device. It does not tell you how an employee feels about it. Both data points are necessary. Organizations with mature DEX programs treat employee sentiment (gathered continuously, in context, and linked to the device conditions at the time) as a required operational data point, not an optional engagement survey.
This is the same discipline that customer-facing organizations apply to their external customers. The internal IT customer deserves the same systematic attention. When sentiment and telemetry are correlated, patterns emerge that neither source reveals on its own.
IT has been measuring server uptime for decades. The employee sitting in front of that server's applications has been measuring something else entirely: and until recently, no one was looking at what they were experiencing. That gap is the DEX opportunity.
What Modern IT Delivery Looks Like in Practice
When DEX is the operating model, the outcomes are observable and measurable. These aren't aspirational: they are what organizations with mature DEX programs consistently achieve.
Issues Resolved Before Employees Feel Them
Endpoint telemetry surfaces performance degradation, application failures, and connectivity problems before they become support tickets. IT intervenes proactively, often with automated remediation, before the employee has noticed anything is wrong. Support volume drops because the problem is solved earlier in its lifecycle.
Software ROI That Can Be Demonstrated
License spend on productivity tools and AI platforms can be validated, or challenged, with actual usage data. Which teams are using Copilot? How deeply? Is the experience quality good enough to drive the productivity gains the business expected? These answers exist when you measure at the endpoint.
A Feedback Loop That Closes
Continuous employee sentiment, collected in context and linked to device conditions, creates a feedback loop that IT can actually act on. When a new software deployment triggers frustration signals across a specific department, IT knows: in days, not at the next annual survey. The loop closes fast enough to course-correct.
IT Value Expressed in Business Terms
DEX programs produce metrics that business stakeholders understand: productivity hours recovered, support cost per employee, software usage rates, and experience scores by department. IT can finally speak the language of the business it serves: not uptime percentages and ticket SLAs, but outcomes that appear on a CFO's radar.
AI That Actually Gets Used
AI productivity tools require healthy, modern endpoints and a workforce ready to use them. DEX programs surface the device and experience quality gaps that silently undermine AI usage and value. Organizations that measure the endpoint before and during AI rollout catch usage problems early: when they can be fixed, not after the budget review.
An Org Culture That Orients Around the User
When employee experience is something IT measures and reports on continuously, it changes the culture of the IT organization. Decisions about software deployment, hardware refresh cycles, and support model design get made with the end user's experience as a visible, quantified factor. That cultural shift is the hardest part: and the most durable outcome.
Why This Matters More Now Than It Did Five Years Ago
The Hybrid Workforce Changed the Failure Mode
When employees worked from the office on a managed network, IT had some natural visibility into device and connectivity problems. In a distributed workforce (home networks, remote locations, varying device configurations), that visibility is gone. The endpoint is the only consistent point of truth, and you either measure it or you don't know what's happening.
AI Investment Has Raised the Stakes
Organizations are committing material budgets to AI productivity platforms. Those investments will succeed or fail based in part on whether the underlying device estate is ready for them and whether employees are actually using them effectively. Without endpoint-level measurement, you won't know which it is until months after the fact.
The Tools Now Exist at Enterprise Scale
Systematic endpoint experience measurement at scale wasn't feasible for most organizations five years ago. The platforms, the AI analysis layer, and the integration ecosystem that make DEX programs operationally viable now exist and are mature. This isn't a frontier technology: it's a proven operating model with a track record. The organizations that have adopted it are pulling ahead of those that haven't.
Ready to Build a DEX Program That Delivers?
Dexterity Digital helps enterprise IT organizations implement the operating model, measurement framework, and technology platform to make Digital Employee Experience a sustainable, measurable discipline: not a one-time initiative.