Ask five digital employee experience platforms what a “good” DEX score looks like, and you’ll get five different answers \u2014 because they’re not measuring the same thing.<\/p>\n
Nexthink blends device and application telemetry with sentiment survey data into a single composite. Other platforms weight VDI session quality more heavily, or lean on how closely application performance correlates with reported friction, or emphasize how deep their historical baselines run. None of these approaches is wrong.<\/p>\n
Each is a reasonable way to model something genuinely hard to measure. But a score of 78 in one platform and a score of 78 in another aren’t the same number, aren’t built from the same inputs, and can’t be compared \u2014 which means the question every IT leader eventually asks in a quarterly review, “are we good, average, or behind?”, usually doesn’t have an answerable answer. Only a comparison against your own platform’s own history.<\/p>\n
This shows up constantly in conversations with clients, who ask a version of the same thing almost every time: do you have benchmarks?<\/em> The honest answer, industry-wide, is no \u2014 not the kind that would let anyone compare across companies, or even across vendors.<\/p>\n It’s worth being clear that this fragmentation isn’t anyone’s fault. Nobody set out to make DEX scores incompatible. There was simply no shared vocabulary to build on, so every vendor built one from scratch, optimized for their own telemetry and their own customers.<\/p>\n The same thing happened in application monitoring for years, until a group of vendors and practitioners agreed on a common data model \u2014 not a shared scoring formula, just a shared way to describe what was measured and how \u2014 and OpenTelemetry became plumbing that any APM tool could sit on top of without giving up its own product.<\/p>\n Cloud cost management had an equivalent problem, and the FinOps Foundation solved it the same way: not by picking a winner, but by giving the industry a shared vocabulary and an open way to compare notes.<\/p>\n DEX looks overdue for the same fix.<\/p>\n We’re proposing a starting point for one, working name OpenDEX<\/strong>. Not another scoring engine, and not a ranking of vendors or products \u2014 three things, kept deliberately small:<\/p>\n A shared taxonomy defining what actually counts toward a DEX score \u2014 device performance, application responsiveness, boot and login time, network quality, collaboration-tool health, sentiment \u2014 so that “responsiveness” means the same thing regardless of who’s measuring it. An open data schema so telemetry from any platform can be described in a common format, the way OpenTelemetry’s semantic conventions work for traces and metrics. And eventually, an anonymized, aggregated benchmark report \u2014 real percentile bands by industry and company size, published openly, with no individual company’s data ever exposed.<\/p>\n None of it exists publicly yet. This post is the proposal, not a launch announcement.<\/p>\n One thing worth saying plainly: Anakage, which is putting this proposal forward, is itself a DEX vendor. A standard that only one vendor controls isn’t a standard anyone should trust, so here’s what’s being committed to before a line of the spec is written. Everything will be openly licensed from day one. Decision-making won’t stay with Anakage for long \u2014 actively recruiting co-founders from outside the company is the immediate next step, including people at other vendors, analysts, and practitioners who’ve asked this exact question. And nothing produced here will ever be used to rank named products against each other.<\/p>\n If this is a problem worth solving to you \u2014 whether you’re a practitioner who’s never been able to answer “are we good?”, an analyst who’s already thought about this, or you work at a DEX vendor with opinions about what a shared taxonomy should and shouldn’t cover \u2014 this is an open invitation to help shape it. Comment to this post \/ email us at contactus@anakage.com\u00a0 with what’s missing from the framing above. The first draft taxonomy is next, and it’s better to get it wrong in public with feedback than to get it wrong alone.<\/p>\n Next steps<\/strong>. This is the first of several updates as the proposal moves from idea to something concrete \u2014 keep an eye on this space for the draft taxonomy, the open data schema, news on who’s joining as co-founders, and the first announcements as this takes shape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ask five digital employee experience platforms what a “good” DEX score looks like, and you’ll get five different answers \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8979,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[88],"class_list":["post-8973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"views":12,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8973"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8983,"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8973\/revisions\/8983"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8973"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anakage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}