Why Every CIO is Thinking About DEX w/ Christy Punch, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Hi everybody, this is Tom. Very quick word from me before we begin with today's very special show, where I was able to sit down and talk to Christy Punch, Principal Analyst at Forrester, about the brand new Forrester Wave Digital Employee Experience Management Solutions Report for 2026. It's a phenomenal read. Not only can you find a link in the show notes to download your own copy of the report free of charge, But in those same show notes, you can click through to our sister show, Soul of the CIO, to watch the entire interview on YouTube.

So take your pick. You can stick with this one. You can watch it live. It's up to you.

Either way, we hope you enjoy it, and we'll see you soon. Bye-bye. Hey, IT Changemakers, and welcome to The Deck Show with Tom McGraw. Let's get into it.

Christy Punch, welcome to the first ever Soul of the CIO Deck Show hybrid dual branded podcast interview. You're an ideal guest for it. Welcome. It's lovely to see you.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Deck Show listeners are going to be more instinctively familiar with your work, but then maybe Soul of the CIO listeners a bit less and a bit less familiar with decks, in fact. So maybe should we start by telling them a bit about what you do and a bit about what you cover for Forrester?

Yeah. So I am a principal analyst at Forrester. And I cover digital workplace and digital employee experience, which is a very broad topic. But I focus on the trends and kind of what's important right now in those spaces.

And that includes the DEX management solutions, which NextThink. Is a part of. So I do research. I advise clients.

I advise vendors. And a big part of my job is doing an evaluation of the DEX management market. And we call that the WAVE report. We are certainly going to get to the wave shortly, Christy.

It's a big deal. But to begin with, we actually, deck show listeners will remember, we were lucky enough to be the first ever podcast you did once you became Forrester's new decks and digital workplace analyst. Tell us, is it about a year ago now? Yeah, it's been about a year.

Tell us about what that year's been like for you. And I guess as a sort of, to give shape to it, how has your view of decks and the space that you're covering changed and evolved in that time? So I have been in the role, like we said, just a little over a year, not new to the digital workplace deck space, but new to being an analyst. So that's a different type of role for me.

Prior to Forrester, I spent 20-ish years as a practitioner leading digital workplace strategy at big Fortune 500 companies. So I've been a customer on the customer side in my past. So being an analyst, I think, has helped me really get me closer to what other companies are doing and what the challenges are in this space. I think one of the values that I add in my role is because I work with both the customers and the vendor, I can kind of bridge that gap and help vendors understand the reality of what CIOs and their companies are experiencing in terms of implementing technology and working on employee adoption, et cetera, et cetera, budgets, all those fun things.

I can help translate that for vendors to understand so that they can improve their products to help address some of those challenges. And how is your understanding of that line of communication between vendors and CIOs and technology leaders evolved during that time? What needs bridging fundamentally in your view? Something that's really important for me when it comes to digital employee experience is the, the fact that it's about the employee, right.

And the employees at the center of that. And so with Dex management tools, you're managing, monitoring, improving the digital. Employee experience Dex. I think what I have found is that a lot of the tooling in this space has really, um, kind of focus on IT operational use cases, reduce support tickets and improve MTTR and really focus on outcomes that are really important for IT organizations, but maybe not so important for the broader business or maybe for employees.

And so I'm a big advocate that DEX tools should be not just for IT teams, they really should be scaled across the business so that you have collaboration with IT, HR, security, finance, all of the functions that play a role and have an important role in those end-to-end employee experiences. So that's a big, really important point for me that I try to hone in on when I talk to vendors and with customers. What are those DEX functionalities coming to the fore which are getting that right, which are managing to translate that potential into reality already?

So a big piece. Of it is connecting the operational metrics to business metrics and business outcomes. So that's things like cost and cost of delay, reducing risk. And what is reducing risk?

How does that improve the business? One kind of key piece that I'm really interested in is how to connect some of the frontline experience metrics to more of the business metrics like throughput and customer service. Because frontline, you're there, you're the face of the company and you're boots on the ground, if you will, in some of those experiences. And so I think it's really important to start to connect the dots between experience improvements and then what does that mean for the business?

The real ROI of. Dex management tools comes to play when you start to look beyond those traditional kind of table stakes use cases that most customers tend to sometimes get stuck in. And does that dovetail with sort of AI transformation in particular? Do you think this is a technology which is naturally escaping the IT department and the IT department's traditional sense of ownership?

And therefore, does DEX travel with AI into other parts of the business? Do you see some sort of relationship there? Yeah, absolutely. I think that what we'll see over the next few years is more AI or agentic AI that's part of the operational workflows that's going to be part of employee journeys.

And so you're going to see employees and agents operating together and collaborating together to get work done. And so that can be a great thing, but also that requires more guardrails and governance that requires. you know. Making sure that the agents have the right access and are operating in the right places, whether that's cloud or native to the device, et cetera.

And so in order to manage all that, to see it, to monitor it, to govern it, and to orchestrate it, you need visibility into those things. And that's where I think DEX management tools come to play. And going back to kind of your original question of, you The use cases, I think absolutely, because when you look at an end-to-end workflow, let's say an easy one to use. Is onboarding, employee onboarding.

It's not just IT that plays a role in ensuring that that's a successful experience. There's a lot of other functions that come to the table. And so I think that's where you're going to start to see more of this broadening of how DEX management tools. Could be used.

One of the major factors in the evolution of DEX in any given company is always determined by employee expectation and executive expectation. Where do you see those expectations presently in 2026 and what effect and impact are they having on that relationship with work and technology that people bring to their jobs? From an employee standpoint, increasingly employees are expecting the technology at work to work like their technology at home. So, you know, we long time ago, back in my early career days, your technology at work was much better than the technology you had at home.

And that was pretty cool. But now the technology that you have, your personal devices tend to be much more modern, advanced and, you know, provide you with more capabilities. But that's because, you know, it's your personal preference. And so I think you'll see employees bring that into the workplace where, If a computer takes a long time to boot up or things are lagging or they just can't, things are clunky and they can't get things done, it's very frustrating.

And it really becomes challenging because they're not used to that with their own personal technology. And there must be very specific implications to adoption trends with AI specifically, right? How does AI complicate the picture when, as you say, at home people are used to using whatever, whatever the limit is. And then that has specific kind of implications in the workplace, right?

Yeah. So AI adoption is no longer the question or the barrier at work. So Forrester's research shows that 78% of employees are using AI every day at work. And I think it's like 38% are using it four times or more a day.

So everybody's using it. So the question isn't, oh, are they using it? And the question now becomes, are they using it to create value? Are they using it in the right ways?

and so i think that that you know again it it makes looking at understanding how employees work and how employees are using the tools that much more important. And how are cios in particular um you mentioned it earlier moving from sort of um Measuring technical performance to better understanding business impact, productivity, workplace sentiment, perhaps particularly with regards to AI. With the kind of move to consumption-based pricing and token pricing with AI tools, especially in enterprise technology, there's going to be a much stricter lens on cost when it comes to AI initiatives and AI tooling from the C-suite.

And so I think what organizations are gonna have to do is start to better understand where they need to invest in AI for where the work is delivering more value for the business or higher impact outcomes. And so in order to do that, you're gonna have to start understanding the cost of the usage and the cost of adoption and who's using what tools. How are they using it? What's the outcomes from using those tools so that that can then inform better investment decisions and start to get into those terms that the CEOs really want to know about, which is the dollars.

Let's get to the wave, Christy. It came out very recently. Was it something you started working on almost your first week or two in the job? No, fortunately not.

But it was a very long process, which is good. It is exhausting, but it is a good process because we get really, as an analyst working on a wave, we get really deep into the details and the nitty gritty of the vendors in this space. It was several months of really digging into detailed criteria, functionality, demos, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, talking to customers and really looking at where do vendors sit when it comes to what they have to offer for their customers. Okay.

How did the whole process surprise you? What did you encounter in your responses and your research that you didn't expect, first of all? So we do the wave. evaluations every two years.

And so the past two years, since the prior wave evaluation for this market, the tooling in this space has really matured. And I think that is just a result of the acceleration of AI technology is almost forced the hand of many of the vendors. You have to accelerate the capabilities you have in your platform. And so as a result, a lot of the kind of what made vendors stand out in the prior wave that was maybe more differentiated then is no longer differentiating.

It's all table stakes. So it made it. Really tricky for me in looking at, you know, who is on like the bleeding edge and who is really doing, thinking about this space differently and really solving problems in a compelling way that's going to help their customers improve their experience. And what were those qualities that separated out those vendors that you were looking at?

Yeah. So tying back to kind of my ongoing rant about scaling the use cases, that is definitely starting to emerge. And a lot of that is being enabled by more governance capabilities within the platform itself. So, you know, one of the things that holds organizations back from adopting remediation, like proactive remediation, is they're just, you know, they just want that verification or that validation.

Before it takes action. And so having in like role-based access controls and approval processes and some of those checks and balances to be able to govern those remediations really helps kind of give that ease of, okay, we have the ability to manage this and have oversight over it. So we're more comfortable implementing these automatic remediations. It makes me think of the topic of DexOps.

And we've got two audiences for this recording, right? So our Dexia audience is going to know what DexOps is. Our CIO audience might not so much. So maybe start with a definition of DexOps and tell me a little bit about where that fit into your research on the way specifically, because what you're kind of describing is the importance of operationalization, right?

Exactly, exactly. And operationalizing around identifying, again, where is intervention going to have the highest impact? How do you coordinate and orchestrate this across teams and across agents in some cases? With DexOps, it really is.

About operationalizing Dex improvements continuously. And that also means improving your operations in addition to improving the experiences. So for me, DexOps played a really crucial role in the evaluation because I was looking at a lot of the capabilities, not just checking a box like, oh, you've got this capability check, I was looking at it as, okay, you have this capability, but how is it enabling the customer to operationalize DEX? How is it helping them really accelerate and scale how they improve their employees' digital experience?

So do you see the onus of that operationalization as being on the customer or the vendors or like a combination of both ideally? I think it's a combination of both. And I think, you know, having been in the trenches myself and working for very large, complex organizations, it's really hard to operationalize cross-functionally. It's really hard to get alignment on priorities and what the most important things are.

And so I think that it does play a role for the vendor in terms of How can they help their customers internally sell the DEX management solution to other functions in the business and help illustrate the value? And so that might be not just by giving them playbooks and training and resources, but also giving them really compelling use cases and helping demonstrate the value that that use case would provide for, say, like an HR or a finance internal partner for these customers.

And so I think that is a role that the DEX vendors can play in kind of helping their customers kind of build the muscle to be able to start to kind of overcome those hurdles when it comes to cross-functional collaborations. you know, this is going to become even more critical as there, you know, becomes a tighter lens on cost around AI consumption. Also as, you know, AI starts to become more native to devices, not just your laptop, but also wearables and more of the edge devices.

The ability to understand the experiences with those devices and how they're being used and who's using them is going to be really paramount in order to continue to govern, prioritize, measure ROI for AI investments. Are we seeing the return almost of IoT in your view? And is that the future of DEX to some degree? So for me, my point of view is yes, in a way.

So again, I have kind of a passion for frontline experiences. And I think they're so important and it seems like with Dex management tools and with AI and the acceleration of that technology, Dex professionals now have access to better understand those experiences and to see what's going on and see how employees on the frontline are, you know, how they're using technology. I think also, you know, in the past frontline employees maybe didn't have all the latest and greatest technology, whereas now, Technology is everywhere.

And, you know, especially when it comes to operational technology on the frontline, that technology is just getting more advanced, more automated. And so the ability to measure the experience and have insights from that is really powerful. What do you think the different DEX platforms increasingly need to do as organizations adopt AI and more complex technology estates to keep delivering value? Yeah.

So one thing that I would love to see is more workflow and journey insights and correlation. So all the data is there. There is a big opportunity and there's some vendors that are starting to dabble in it. So there are vendors that are looking into this, but it's being able to connect the dots across the data points into end-to-end journeys or experiences.

So Today, we tend to measure with index tools, we tend to measure things like devices and device health and sentiment. And then we kind of bring it together and have insights. Here's what this likely means or here's what the root cause is. But what if you had the ability to measure an end-to-end journey, to track journeys across your digital ecosystem?

Like I said, the data's there, but I think what's missing is the contextualization. data, the relationships across the data. So this is the age-old people process technology. How do you start to connect the dots across those things and surface insights that tell you not just how the technology's doing or what employees are experiencing with that technology, but actually understanding how employees are working with the technology and where the technology fits within these value streams across the business.

I was always interested to ask you, Christy, about the relationship between employees and human beings on the one hand and AI and technology on the other, right? You're somebody who in your presentations brings a lot of individuality to the front of. It, right? Yeah.

And is there a danger there? that we see this very powerful technology start to obscure individuality and the individual at large in organizations and in the workplace. And what is the counterbalance to that? What is the antidote to it?

There definitely has to be a balance. I think the biggest concern, um, well, our research, uh, shows that employees biggest concerns is, is bias and trust around AI. And so, um, Organizations, as they start to bring in more automation and AI agents that are going to work alongside employees, they really need to make sure that they have the mechanisms and the guardrails in place so that that trust can be earned with employees so employees feel comfortable working with AI. But I agree with you.

I think also that culture plays a huge role in the employee experience. It's just you can't deny it. And so I think that organizations that have a really good culture will thrive in this type of environment and not necessarily lose that employee focus. But I do think that if organizations aren't careful and aren't leaning into their cultures, they could potentially kind of lose that value that they get from their human employees and also, of course, employees themselves.

employee trust can easily erode. How else are AI agents and automation changing that dynamic between employees, IT, and maybe like the service desk in particular? One thing that we have data on as well is what we call silent sufferers. And I am one of them, where you avoid the help desk and you just deal with an issue until You finally just can't even work anymore.

And then you finally give up and call the help desk. So there are, I think our data says like 48% of employees avoid the help desk, which is a huge number. And so there are people out there suffering with technology issues because they just don't have the time, don't want to deal with calling the help desk, et cetera, et cetera. when it comes to AI and some of the more self-service remediation opportunities that we see with like Next Think Spark, what's interesting is that's like a great way to reach those silent sufferers because it gives them a way to resolve their own issues without having to get on the phone or wait three days for a ticket or talk to somebody and tell them a hundred times that they have already rebooted their computer five times and it didn't fix the problem.

And so I think with those more of those self-service tools, it's, it's an easy, the, the, you know, the agent knows who you are, knows your computer stats can sometimes tell you like what's causing your problem and then give you the option to, Hey, I can fix this. You want me to fix it right now? Yes. And then it's right then it's fixed.

And so it doesn't become this. Like task that you keep procrastinating when you don't, when you want to avoid the help desk, you can just open up this agentic support and be able to solve your problem right there. So given that, what's your vision for the future IT professionals focus on work? Yeah, I think that what that does is it elevates support desk staff to work on the more complex issues, the issues that the agents can't solve or maybe don't need to solve because maybe there's more risk involved or there's greater impact if something were to go haywire.

And so I think it allows the support staff to really upskill and level up and start to focus on those higher tier support issues. Let me finish by asking you for some practical advice for those CIOs who are seeking to move decks from an improvement initiative to something that's enduring, to something that's really an executive culture changing priority. The advice that I give clients is to just start small and not try to think of like everything in the kitchen sink all at once, etc.

, And so I advise folks to pick one really good cross-functional experience. So we mentioned onboarding earlier. Onboarding is a great example. Another good example is time to shift start productivity, which is a mouthful.

But it's basically how quickly can employees start their day. And so that's a great one because you can look at that at scale or you can look at it in a very like focused way. lens, like say for a frontline experience. So if like you're a retail organization or you, you know, have shifts, employees that have shifts and shift starts, what I advise is you focus on, take one experience, you bring together the functions that play a role in that experience.

You map that experience end to end, and then you start to identify what are those signals or those metrics, whether it's coming from the device, the software, the network, the employee, what are those signals across that journey? And then what is good look like? What do we want that outcome to be? And what needs to be fixed?

Where's the friction in that journey that needs to be addressed to get to that outcome? And so I think starting there and starting small and identifying what works for your organization, identifying how looking at that DEX view can help can really deliver value for your organization, I think that that then gives you the ability to, okay, that was good. Now let's scale. Let's add another experience or let's bring in another business unit to start to look at something.

So start small and then scale. Phenomenal. And maybe give The Wave a read as well. Yes.

Everybody read The Wave. Who knows? I might be able to go to the show notes of one of these shows at least and maybe follow a link. It's been a pleasure.

This was fun. I like it. Thanks, Kristen. Thanks.

That's it for this week's Deck Show. We'll be back next week. And if you don't already. Be sure to follow the show so you don't miss an episode.

Until next time.