Everything can look fine — and still not be fine.
Dashboards stay green. SLAs are met. Tickets close on time.
Yet users feel slowed down, interrupted, and quietly frustrated. The reality is that most digital workplace challenges don’t come from systems being down. They come from systems technically working in ways that still get in the way of real work.
As Vinod Jeyachandran put it during our recent webinar:
“You may function — but you won’t flourish.”
This is the gap between IT performance and user reality.
Traditional IT metrics answer a narrow question: Is the system operating within defined thresholds?
Uptime, response times, and ticket closure rates validate availability. They confirm that services are being delivered as designed. What they don’t confirm is whether people can move through their day without unnecessary friction.
We see this most often in environments where everything is stable — but slightly misaligned:
From a monitoring perspective, nothing is wrong.
From a human perspective, everything feels heavier than it should.
One reason experience issues are so difficult to surface is that they don’t behave like incidents.
“There’s no alert for frustration,” Vinod noted. “Experience problems show up as friction — small delays, repeated interruptions, extra steps people deal with every day.”
Those moments don’t trip thresholds. They accumulate.
A few seconds here. An extra login there. A workflow that breaks focus just often enough to be noticed. Over time, users stop trusting the tools meant to help them — not because they’re unreliable, but because they’re exhausting.
Performance metrics are binary: up or down.
Experience degrades gradually — until it becomes impossible to ignore.
One of the clearest indicators that experience has degraded isn’t ticket volume — it’s behavior.
“Shadow IT is my biggest early warning sign,” Vinod said. “If users are solving problems themselves, the friction is already real.”
Workarounds emerge when the cost of waiting exceeds the cost of risk.
We tend to see this first around identity, access, and endpoints — areas where controls technically work, but interrupt workflows just often enough to push people elsewhere. Engineers create temporary fixes. End users find side paths that keep work moving.
Different behaviors. Same signal.
Ignoring them is what turns friction into exposure.
Security often gets positioned as the antagonist in experience conversations, but that framing misses the point.
“Security isn’t the enemy,” Vinod explained. “Frustration comes from how policies intersect with real workflows.”
When controls are implemented without validating how work actually happens, they feel arbitrary. That perception matters — even when the policy itself is sound.
We see this play out when security decisions are made in isolation, then retrofitted into environments already under pressure. The result isn’t stronger posture — it’s resistance.
Experience-aware environments don’t weaken security.
They align it — using feedback to understand where controls protect productivity and where they unintentionally block it.
Many modernization initiatives stall not because of technology, but because of fatigue.
“People want transformation — but they don’t want upheaval.”
This shows up when progress is defined by milestones instead of outcomes. Migrations complete. Platforms deploy. Legacy systems retire. And yet, six months later, users still struggle.
We’ve seen time and again that improvements that look successful at deployment can feel very different once real workflows, edge cases, and scale come into play.
Users don’t experience modernization as a checklist.
They experience it as friction — or relief.
Another theme that surfaced clearly was mindset.
“There’s no endpoint,” Vinod said. “If you treat metrics as the destination, you miss the friction until it becomes systemic.”
Experience-led environments are never “done.” They rely on continuous feedback — observing how changes land, adjusting controls, refining workflows, and responding before friction hardens into distrust.
This is less about chasing perfect metrics and more about staying responsive to how work evolves.
When experience gaps persist, the cost compounds quietly.
“If people are constantly compensating for technology limitations,” Vinod noted, “it becomes a productivity tax.”
That tax shows up as:
None of it appears on a dashboard. All of it affects output, morale, and momentum.
Closing the gap doesn’t require abandoning metrics. It requires listening differently.
Effective IT leaders:
Experience becomes visible when feedback is treated as signal — not anecdote.
Want the Full Conversation?
Watch the complete webinar, The Gap Between IT Performance and User Reality, to hear real-world examples and deeper discussion on where experience gaps emerge — and how IT leaders are addressing them.
