Is improving employee IT experience a 'ticked box', or have we put the cart before the horse with customer focus?

Eavesdropped insights from behind the closed doors of the latest Computing IT Leaders Dining Club...

Is the need to improve employee IT experiences already a "ticked box" which we should presume solved as we move onto paying customers, or are many organisations still lacking behind internally, and forgetting some of their most important, internal customers?

So raged the debate at Computing's recent IT Leaders Dining Club, in association with BlackBerry, which focused on the theme of digital transformation.

After hearing that only 9 per cent of UK IT professionals we surveyed believe that digital transformation is about "improving the employee experience", while 44 per cent believed it should be about the customer, and 43 per cent about general business efficiency, opinions at the table were divided.

The strongest voices - perhaps surprisingly - came from hugely different concerns within the private and public sectors.

"I'm surprised it's as low as 9 per cent, said a public sector IT leader, "But I'm not necessarily saying that I could cite we're doing a lot better - I'm just surprised that big oranistions didn't score higher on that."

Asked if they would still build their own digital transformation case around employee experience for their public sector department, the IT leader replied:

"I work in the public sector and it's a bit of a differene element, We're very protective of employees - we don't make them redundant or lose their jobs just like that. But I can see how people might blur that into business process," the IT leader argued.

But a private sector IT director believed the state of modern IT should make almost any firm ready to move beyond the perception it must serve itself before others:

"We've done all the evolution of IT stuff though - in the nineties and noughties that was all around process and ERP systems, IT enabling the business and all that back office stuff. it's kind of a given that you've got a [robust] email system now. You've gone through that and ticked box, job done, now it's time to take on the customer stuff.

"It's about optimising internal processes - optimising the way we do business, not the business itself," argued the private sector IT boss.

"It's all been about being more efficient as a business and not the customer itself - saving costs internally."

The Computing IT Leaders Dining Club is conducted under Chatham House rules, so all names are removed, and quotes may be changed and approximated at all times.