Three Critical CIO Focus Areas: Insights From Gartner Digital Workplace Summit

From the June 10-11, Riverbed exhibited at the Gartner Digital Workplace Summit 2024 in London, an event designed to help business and IT leaders discover the insights they need to prepare for digital evolution. With over 850 attendees, 42 exhibitors and 50 sessions covering four research tracks, there was much to discover.

At the conference, stands and speakers explored how today’s companies can:

• Understand their digital workplace maturity level
• Learn how to advance their digital employee experience
• Discover how to leverage GenAI for increased workplace productivity
• Tackle topics like hybrid working, collaboration tools, and more

As leaders in AI observability, a technology that supports each of these areas, we were well-positioned to advise and empower attendees. Here are three key takeaways from the event and our conversations there.

AI is top of mind at C-level

AI and its adoption are critical components of a CIO’s role–so the implementation and use of these technologies are a discussion for the boardroom. This point was highlighted at the summit.

Gartner shared research from its 2022 Digital Worker Survey, in which 49% of respondents named the CIO as one of the top three executives whose policies and actions have had the most positive influence on their employee experience. This aligned with our own findings that 75% of CIOs are testing or implementing AI projects, and that AI projects top budget spending over the next three years. However, the challenge is implementing AI that works.

Gartner highlighted the importance of breaking down siloed experiences, reducing fragmentation and risk, and prioritizing impactful investments. This is exactly what we do at Riverbed: we use powerful AI and machine-learning technology to achieve these goals automatically, with minimal need for human intervention. We pride ourselves on our library of 170 pre-built, expert-designed, triggered remediations.

The total experience matters most

While the experience you give your customers is paramount, employees need an exceptional one too. However, delivering better user experiences is getting harder with increasing IT complexity, end-user demands, and hybrid work.

Our scalable solutions collect, analyze, automate, and report on real data through a Unified Agent with a single, simple user interface. This means we can deliver actionable insights on user experience at every device, application, and click; immediately diagnose user experience issues, remotely and non-invasively; and pinpoint opportunities to improve the digital experience. What’s more, we tackle the problem of agent fatigue by collecting more data without adding agents via our unified agent manager.

We also offer superior out-of-box experiences for popular business process applications and open support for 35 third-party integrations–including AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Workspace, ServiceNow, and Slack–so every employee’s every experience is monitored and optimized.

Frontline workers need our focus

Gartner’s 2022 Digital Worker Survey found that most employees still only view IT as a support function, with 55% approaching IT for technical support. Yet, IT can’t prevent and resolve critical issues fast enough, with a flood of false-positive alerts, a shortfall of top IT talent, and a lack of tools and precise insights into which notifications matter.

This is especially challenging for frontline workers, whose jobs are essential and whose digital experience can be life-changing – and life-saving. The good news is that we can remedy their issues in the ways we’ve mentioned above, giving them fewer blue-screen moments and more seamless processes that boost their productivity and drive better outcomes. We can also support them across mobile and tablet devices, which they tend to use in their fast-paced, often-physical roles.

With 155 million new company-owned devices entering the market every year, unsurprisingly, this creates gaps in measuring device performance. Enter our mobile device data-collection solution, Aternity Mobile, which gathers over 150 metrics on mobile device, app and network performance. This allows IT to proactively identify digital experience issues on company-provided mobile devices and take action. It works on Apple iOS and Android across the most complete range and broadest coverage of user experience devices: computer, web, mobile, and free-standing kiosks.

At Riverbed, we support businesses in building more digitally mature workplaces using a unique combination of employee experience expertise and state-of-the-art, AI-powered tools. We hope to see you at an event soon, but in the meantime, get in touch with our friendly, helpful team to find out more about what we do and how we can help.