The experience hype
With XLA (eXperience Level Agreement) now being at the dizzy heights of the Gartner Hype Cycle for ITSM ( Siddharth Shetty and Chris Laske , June 2024), lots of people are talking about experience. So, I thought it was a good time to define this illusive phenomenon and clarify some examples of how it is used.
Experience
When helping Marco Gianotten write the XLA Pocketbook, I did a bit of research as to what psychologists say about experience. The American Psychological Association’s dictionary is a deep rabbit hole and I have explored much of it. Some examples of their definitions:
We ended up defining experience as “a set of emotions, feelings, and judgments that result from sensory perception while living through an event, where:
In Reflections on XLA, I refined the definition as “the set of emotions, feelings, and judgments that arise – in time and over time – from exposure to the presence of or interaction with people and things.” Both definitions work.
Be aware that this is just one of several meanings of experience. It can also mean something that is experienced (such as a car drive as an experience), the experiencing of something (experiencing driving a car), or the amount of exposure to something through which knowledge of it is acquired (three years of having driven cars). The meaning is usually clear from the context but there is still potential for confusion.
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Experiences
In IT, we often talk about the employee experience, customer experience (CX), user experience (UX), digital employee experience (DEX), and more recently developer experience (DevEx). But how are these related to each other? I have attempted to summarize some main points in the header figure. The largest circle represents the human experience in general, and is split into personal and work (employee experience), where the dotted line indicates that these influence each other. If you’ve had a bad day at work, it would be unusual if that didn’t affect how you feel when you get home. And vice versa.
In the figure, pX (both pX and wX are my own abbreviations) represents the various roles in which we have experiences in our private life: as a partner, for example. Similarly, wX represents the various roles in which we have experiences at work: as a software developer (DevEx), for example. DevEx (developer experience) refers to the overall experience of software developers in their work environment, encompassing their interactions with tools, technologies, processes, and the organizational culture. It aims to optimize the developers' workflow, productivity, and job satisfaction. The concept applies to other roles as well, of course, but I am not aware of other roles where it is referred to as explicitly as DevEx.
CX refers to customer experience, where the customer can be a consumer or a business customer.
UX refers to user experience, where the user can be a consumer or a business user. When UX refers to use of digital technology (including IT) at work, the term digital employee experience (DEX) can also be used. DEX is often used in the context of digital experience monitoring (DEM) that makes use of tools such as real user monitoring (RUM), endpoint monitoring (EP), and synthetic transaction monitoring (STM) to monitors the technical components that influence the end-user experience.
In the work context, CX, UX/DEX, and the various manifestations of wX all contribute to the general employee experience that is influenced by factors such as the employee’s relationships with managers and co-workers, the content of their work and potential for development, the trust and autonomy afforded to them, their ‘tools’ (e.g. IT) and physical environment, their salary and other formal terms and conditions.
Evangelist for Systematic Transformation applying Collaborative Autonomy, Streaming Integration Data Meshes, and Event-Based Operating Model Architectures
7 个月I like the initial description as the present contents of consciousness, I like this because as you go through life you seem to gather and add, refine or forget the things you precive through your senses which give Joy or sorrow leading to attraction or Aversion as the budhha says.
Divergent Thinking, Communications in KM, Change R&D, Art
7 个月So, I didn't do my homework here,which is to read your more extensive descriptions of things elsewhere. But even at this summary level, you can make a comment about what "level" means here, who does the agreeing, and what agreeing to it changes. Whence, why it supposedly works and why there is hype... Staying tuned....
High-Performance IT Specialist | Helping People at Product Operations, IT Operations & IT Engineering Teams Make Better Decisions | Neurodiverse
7 个月Ana Santos, Catherine Zuim, Gregory Dias Marques, Umberto Correia, Renê Chiari
Connecting work to value with data.
7 个月Excellent perspective Mark! In many ways I see this as a reframing of workplace ergonomics for human centered/ knowledge work. Does that sound plausible?