Explore expert insights, tips, and best practices to optimize your IT operations
Tap into a wealth of knowledge from your peers, industry experts, and the ControlUp team, deepening your understanding of ControlUp products and solutions.
ControlUp helps IT teams address common digital workplace experience challenges, no matter their use cases or existing technologies.
ControlUp offers a rich set of capabilities to improve the digital experience for employees using any desktop, any application, anywhere.
Explore expert insights, tips, and best practices to optimize your IT operations
Tap into a wealth of knowledge from your peers, industry experts, and the ControlUp team, deepening your understanding of ControlUp products and solutions.
A global organization of technology professionals transforming the desktop monitoring marketplace.
Matt Pinnell Most performance measurement tools take a straightforward approach: they monitor everything on a device and generate scores based on overall metrics. I’ve spent years training help desks around the world, and I can tell you that this approach misses the point entirely.
Let me give you a practical example. You’re on a video call, actively engaged in a discussion. You’ve got ten other applications running in the background. One of those background applications starts running slowly. Do you care? More importantly, should that affect your experience score when you’re focused entirely on your video call?
The Context Conundrum
Traditional DEX scoring falls short here. Pure device metrics don’t tell the full story of the employee experience. What matters is what actually impacts your ability to execute your job.
Think about healthcare environments, where certain applications consume massive amounts of system resources. Functionality can mean literal life and death, and you don’t want to be bogged down in troubleshooting the applications that don’t matter. Some applications are memory tolerant; others fall apart under those same conditions. Your DEX scoring needs to understand these nuances. It needs to recognise when heavy resource usage is expected and when it’s problematic.
Beyond Device-Level Management
What we’ve learned working with enterprises is that they need granular control. Every organisation has unique requirements, critical applications, and specific use cases. Coming in with a one-size-fits-all scoring system doesn’t work.
Instead, we need to measure digital experience in two distinct ways:
- Pure device measurement when overall performance matters
- Active application focus when specific tools are critical to job execution
This is about more than flexibility—it’s about accuracy. It’s about measuring what impacts your employees’ ability to complete their work within their contracted hours.
Creating Meaningful Measurements
The key is customisation. Your DEX scoring should allow you to:
- Focus on specific applications that are critical to your business
- Create different thresholds based on actual usage patterns
- Adapt measurements based on employee roles and requirements
- Account for varying conditions across different work environments
For instance, if you’re using a critical application that requires significant resources, your DEX score should understand that context. It should be able to provide earlier warnings when conditions approach levels that might impact that specific application’s performance.
Real Experience vs. Raw Numbers
Here’s what makes this approach powerful: it aligns with how people actually work. When you’re actively using an application, that’s when its performance matters most. Your experience isn’t defined by the average performance of every application on your system—it’s defined by the performance of the tools you’re actively using to do your job.
This is particularly crucial in today’s hybrid work environments. The same application might perform differently in the office versus at home. Your DEX scoring needs to understand these contextual differences and adjust accordingly.
Making it Work for Your Organization
Implementing this kind of contextual DEX scoring requires the following:
- Clear understanding of which applications are truly critical
- Recognition of different user personas and their needs
- Ability to adapt thresholds based on actual usage
- Focus on enabling job execution rather than raw performance metrics
The goal isn’t to create more complex measurements—it’s to create more meaningful ones. When your DEX scoring aligns with how your employees work, you can focus on what truly matters: enabling people to do their jobs effectively.
This approach to DEX scoring goes beyond measuring performance—it’s about measuring performance that matters. Because at the end of the day, the only metrics that count are the ones that genuinely impact your employees’ ability to execute their work.
Remember: your employees don’t care about device metrics. They care about getting their work done without hoops and headaches. Your DEX scoring should reflect that reality.
Ready to learn more about DEX and DEX scoring? Visit our solutions pages or schedule a demo.
