What is Desktop and Process Analytics?

Imagine this: You’re a business owner who knows there are opportunities within your organization to become more efficient or cut costs, but you’re not quite sure where to start. However, you do know that data is a powerful tool and want to leverage it to make meaningful changes.

For many organizations, desktop and process analytics can inform those changes. Desktop analytics provides insights into how employees use existing software to achieve your business’s goals. Process analytics maps events on employee desktops to processes, enabling you to uncover process bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or cost savings in an organization’s practice.

Let’s walk through how these concepts can help uncover opportunities to optimize processes and performance.

Understanding Desktop Analytics

In the business sense, desktop and process analytics gives managers unprecedented visibility into employee activities, how they do them, and the time they spend on them by capturing data directly from the employee desktop. This operational visibility gives organizations actionable analytics and insights to help make better business decisions and improve processes and employee performance.

In the technical sense, desktop and process analytics software tools include a capture component residing on the employee’s desktop or laptop to collect information about what the employee is working on–anytime. In its simplest form, it tracks what applications are active down to the granular level of the exact screen or URL. So, managers can understand how much time an employee spends in production-related applications used during the business day–and how that compares with other team members. It also tracks when there is no desktop activity, indicating idle time or time spent in meetings, breaks, or lunch.

The solution also enables users to define rule-based “event triggers” to capture specific desktop activities or events, including activities occurring within particular applications, such as filling a specific field. For example, if you want to start tracking specific processes, you can create a trigger for the start of a process, which might be the opening of a new order form, and the end, which might be the “event” of clicking on the submit button.

Tracking these time-stamped events enables you to build average handle times for end-to-end processes and individual process steps. You can also create a trigger to capture specific screen information, such as an order number, to track that item from start to finish. Additionally, you can set up pop-up alerts based on an event to remind the user of the next step or an empty field.

What Is Desktop Analytics?

Desktop analytics describes the cloud-based service that provides insights into the performance of an operating system (OS). It helps IT professionals make informed decisions about application updates and upgrades. This ensures compatibility and minimizes disruptions.

Desktop analytics can extend to such areas as:

• Software updates
• Compliance monitoring
• Troubleshooting

 Why Desktop Analytics Matters

Who benefits from desktop analytics? Well, everyone does. Desktop analytics impacts software users at every level, from the C-suite to the end user.

Benefits for Businesses

Businesses benefit from improved productivity and cost savings. This minimizes downtime and maximizes productivity. In addition, desktop analytics can pinpoint unused or underused software licenses. When a business eliminates those unnecessary costs, it can create cost savings.

Desktop analytics is a major part of data-driven decision-making.

When businesses understand how employees use their computers, they can tailor their IT infrastructure to meet user needs and improve satisfaction and company efficiency.

 Benefits for Employees

Desktop analytics don’t just serve corporate interests but personal ones, too. Desktop analytics can highlight inefficient workflows or problematic software at an individual level, improving personal productivity. It’s also an excellent tool for troubleshooting and enabling users to fix problems quickly.

Real-time application usage reporting also becomes a data-driven, trusted source of employee performance data. Employees can be measured equitably against the same metrics such as time spent in production-related applications vs. goal. Making this insight available to the employee with performance management scorecards gives the employee real-time feedback and empowers them to self-correct their behaviors to ensure their productivity goals are being met.

Understanding Process Analytics

Desktop analytics is one way to gauge performance and make decisions, but it’s not the only one. Process analytics, which harnesses data from employee desktops to identify processes and transaction workflows, is another. Process analytics uses quantitative methods to derive meaningful insights.

Process analytics can extend from the strategy level to the operational one.

What Is Process Analytics?

What does process analytics entail? It uses many of the same ideas as desktop analytics. Critical components of process analytics include data integration and transformation, converting it from one format or structure to another.

Two major differentiating components of process analytics are prescriptive and predictive analytics. The former predicts what will happen and suggests various courses of action based on likely outcomes. Predictive analytics uses statistical techniques and machine learning algorithms to predict future outcomes based on historical data.

The Importance of Process Analytics

Why is process analytics important? Like desktop analytics, it offers valuable insights to businesses and their employees. Process analytics pays major dividends for improving efficiency and cost reduction, as it identifies bottlenecks and pinpoints areas of waste or duplication. It’s also an impactful tool for risk mitigation, especially regarding regulatory compliance or security breaches.

Businesses that use process analytics often provide better products and services, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and a competitive advantage.

Benefits and Challenges of Desktop and Process Analytics

Desktop and process analytics are fantastic practices for boosting operational efficiency, but like any tool, they have pros and cons. As you weigh whether to adopt them for your operations, consider the following benefits and challenges.

Benefits

As noted above, desktop and process analytics offer flexible ways for companies to increase efficiency and, consequently, their competitive advantage. As businesses better understand the ways their employees use software or accomplish tasks, they can begin to reduce costs and redundancies. With that data at your disposal, you can start to make changes–including using workforce management software to accurately forecast and schedule employees for maximum productivity.

 Challenges

Of course, desktop and process analytics aren’t without drawbacks. Companies exploring these tools must be aware of data privacy and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.

In addition to data security, ensuring the quality of that data is essential. Regularly cleaning and consolidating that data into one easily navigable database can provide your business with maximum benefit from desktop and process analytics.

Finally, as you work through using your analytics to improve efficiency, be wary of difficulties with change management. Have a plan to educate managers on how to use the data, alleviate employee concerns over privacy and fairness, and ensure smooth transitions, especially when eliminating inefficiencies concerning software or hardware allocation.

Use Cases

The potential ways to use this solution to capture data are numerous. Verint has found some of the most common uses for its software solution set, Desktop and Process Analytics, include:

1. Monitoring applications for performance and responsiveness.
2. Helping ensure PCI compliance by triggering the start/stop of audio and screen recordings when sensitive information is being exchanged.
3. Finding hidden capacity and recapturing idle and non-productive time for improved employee productivity.
4. Increasing productivity by decreasing handle time and error rates and providing personalized guidance during transactions to help ensure process compliance.
5. Improving processes by mapping and analyzing them in near real time to identify variances, bottlenecks, and streamlining opportunities.
6. Flagging and generating alerts on potentially non-compliant activities to help reduce risk.

Desktop and Process Analytics requires minimal space and IT resources to install. And it requires no lengthy data integrations! Administrators are trained to create triggers to capture the desired events, which are translated into actionable reporting. The fast installation and almost immediate reporting can lead to a quick return on investment, as illustrated by a business processing outsourcer that was able to “realize a 5 percent efficiency improvement within the first two weeks.”

Steps to Implementing Desktop and Process Analytics

Take a systematic approach as you implement desktop and process analytics into your company’s operations.

1. Identify Goals and Objectives

Determine what you want to achieve using analytics. Your goals might include improving productivity, optimizing processes, identifying bottlenecks, or reducing costs. Your goals and objectives should align with your overall business strategy.

2. Data Collection and Preparation

Once your goals are clear, collect and prepare the necessary data. That includes identifying the types of data you need for analysis. For desktop analytics, this might consist of user activity data or application usage. For process analytics, it might include transaction information or process logs.

Use appropriate tools and methods to collect the required data. Ensure data collection methods are consistent and reliable, but be mindful of security and privacy concerns. Once you’ve collected the appropriate data, integrate the data from different sources into a unified view. This might involve using ETL (extract, transform, load) processes or other data integration techniques.

With all your data in one place, it’s time to clean it. Check the data for errors or inconsistencies and correct them. This ensures your data’s quality and reliability. If you are a customer of Verint Open Platform, the data is ingested into the Engagement Data Hub for use in analysis and creating a holistic picture of your customer interactions, employee performance and customer feedback.

3. Analytics Implementation

With the data ready, it’s time to implement the analytics. This involves:

• Choosing the proper analysis techniques. Depending on your goals, choose the appropriate analysis techniques. This could include descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, or prescriptive analytics.
• Using analytics tools. Implement the chosen analysis techniques using the appropriate tools.
• Performing your analysis. Run the analysis, ensuring you correctly configure it to meet your goals and objectives.
• Interpreting the results. Analyze the results, looking for insights that align with your goals. This might involve using data visualization techniques to make the results more understandable.
• Taking action. Based on the insights you gain, take appropriate action. This could involve changing processes, training users, or implementing new tools or systems.

Remember, desktop and process analytics are ongoing activities. Regularly review and update your goals, collect and prepare new data, and perform further analyses to keep up with changes in your business environment.

 Conclusion

Ultimately, desktop and process analysis are among many tools that can boost the efficiency of your business and employees. If you implement them correctly, however, you can see significant returns on the time and energy you invest. Whether you want to ensure the right number of scheduled employees or better manage your software licenses, consider desktop and process analysis to see what shifts you can make.