The next IT frontier: measuring people's digital experience

For years we have measured IT success through technical KPIs: service availability, response times, SLAs met, tickets closed. These are important metrics, but they tell only part of the story.

The real question is a different one: how do employees actually experience the digital tools they use every day?

The invisible cost of digital friction

A slow-booting PC. An application that takes 15 seconds to launch. Recurring authentication issues. An unstable connection during an important video call. None of these events generates a critical incident in traditional IT dashboards, yet their cumulative impact on productivity, on people's satisfaction and, ultimately, on the business is enormous.

Organisations that systematically measure digital experience quality and rank in the top quartile record, according to Gartner DEX 2025 analyses, a 38% higher talent retention rate, 55% lower perceived downtime and an average 18% productivity increase. These are not ancillary numbers: they are the bridge between technology investment and business outcome.

From reactive to proactive: the role of DEX

This is where Digital Employee Experience (DEX) comes in. DEX enables a shift from a reactive approach — intervening when the ticket is already open — to a proactive one: continuously monitoring the quality of users' digital experience, identifying anomalies before they become problems and measuring the real impact of IT services on people's daily work.

The difference is substantial. A traditional SLA says "the network is available at 99.9%." A DEX indicator says "the time perceived by users to launch Teams has gone from 2 to 8 seconds in the past week, across 340 devices at the Milan site." The former reassures the monthly report; the latter enables action before the help desk is flooded with complaints.

AI PCs, agents and automation: DEX as the compass

With the arrival of AI PCs equipped with dedicated NPUs, agentic AI applied to the Service Desk and intelligent workflow automation, Digital Employee Experience will become one of the most important strategic indicators for CIOs. Not because it is a trend, but because it is the only metric that aligns technology and people.

The future of the Digital Workplace will not be defined by the number of managed devices, but by the quality of the experience we can offer the people who use them.

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