The Kyndryl Digital Workplace differentiator: A data-driven approach
At the epicenter is Digital Experience Management (DEM), a capability that fuels the data-driven approach. DEM monitors and analyzes device and application performance along with telemetry data, using the insights along with other workplace data to feed custom experience-level agreements (XLAs) with specific ESG metrics that customers want to measure against their ESG initiatives.
“When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions data, so much of it is based on financial estimates, but how are you going to move the needle if you don’t start capturing real data? You can’t improve what you can’t see,” says Kirkpatrick. “If you’re going to drive down environmental impacts or increase social engagement among employees, you need to measure that alongside strategic business outcomes from actual usage and sentiment data.”
Kyndryl’s Digital Workplace solutions address that delta by measuring data that can be captured and verified. This data can be used to continuously optimize costs and usage patterns, enabling ongoing improvements to employee experience, such as network adjustments that ensure optimal bandwidth for specific hybrid work patterns. DEM data can also empower responsible deployment and procurement decisions that advance customers’ sustainability objectives — for instance, surfacing insights that allow for optimization of which specific hardware models to buy from a historical energy efficiency point of view, based on employee workloads.
DEM’s ability to proactively manage by “persona” means that data is collected and analyzed at a granular level, ensuring that factors such as geography, preferred apps, or individual device settings are considered to deliver a more personalized and automated experience. The ability to automate resolution through remediation configuration or self-healing helps reduce unnecessary travel time for IT support teams, which can lower energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.
DEM also informs a health score for a device, providing guidance to IT on optimal refresh cycles. This reduces the number of devices procured over time, which has a positive impact on the downstream ecosystem, including manufacturing, transportation, and even raw materials. “It’s about driving and measuring all those different areas together to reduce cost and improve performance, and doing it in the most sustainable way,” Kirkpatrick says.
Another data-centric piece of Kyndryl’s offerings comes from an innovation partnership with World Wide Generation (WWG), the creator of the industry-leading G17Eco platform. G17Eco, developed in collaboration with more than 300 contributors with collective experience in sustainability and sustainable development, is an interoperable solution used by global market stakeholders and partners to map, monitor, measure, manage, and market their SDG and ESG goals in a coordinated way.
The global end-to-end G17Eco solution, underpinned by a digital taxonomy, aids in reporting and disclosure against global standards, frameworks, and regulations. The solution integrates cloud-based distributed ledger technology to provide trust and transparency of timely, verified, and assured data, helping organizations map, monitor, and measure against the United Nation’s SDGs and other major global reporting frameworks such as Global Reporting Initiative to maintain compliance,” Kirkpatrick explains. “But when you infuse social and environmental initiatives into the core of what you do and measure it alongside business goals, you unlock the real business opportunity and economic value around ESG. The way we deliver that is by making the data we capture operationally aligned to the outcomes of both ESG and customer value realization, and XLAs is the way our Digital Workplace solutions bring all that together.”
