Persona Insight - Customization Guide (V1.0.0.0)

This document refers to the original version of Persona Insight, released December 2021 (V1.0.0.0)

Overview

The Persona Insight Library Pack is a turnkey solution allowing you to measure activity across a range of technical and sentiment based areas so that you can build an understanding of the behaviors of Employees as they go about their daily work.

The pack is slightly different to other Nexthink Library Packs in that it is essentially a framework of measurements that enables you solve a multitude of Business requirements. Therefore by importing and running the pack, you will discover your Persona-based activities of your Employees but in fact it is what you do with this information that will provide you with the real power and functionality that the pack brings.

Customization

Customization of the pack may be done at multiple levels, depending on the outcome wanted. The most common customizations will be those at a Score level or a Metric level to define new Persona Traits or Persona’s. It helps to understand what is meant by each term precisely:

• A Persona Trait is a measured gradient-based, scale of how much an employee corresponds to something – from how many monitors, to how much they use an application to how mobile they are, it should all be measurable.

• A Persona is an actionable categorization of an individual, such as “needs more powerful Device”. A Persona can be defined within a score, or alternatively can be defined in a Metric using criteria.

Advantages of Personas or Persona Traits in Scores

The advantage of manipulating at the score level means that the values are always available in Finder views, in Investigations, for use in metric calculations and through NXQL queries when integrating with Nexthink. In particular note that if a Persona you define has perhaps five individual Traits then simply defining the persona at the metric level without doing so at the Score level would potentially mean each time you wished to “use” the persona in a new metric you would have to reference the full set of traits again. By putting this into a score, the score does the work and the output Persona can be used as a simple, single value in a metric definition.

Advantages of Personas or Persona Traits in Metrics

The advantage of defining new Personas or Persona Traits at the metric level is simplicity, there is no complex score manipulation to be defined. However you will need to bear in mind if this Persona or Persona Trait is used multiple times then it will need to be repeatedly defined in each metric. It will also not be retrievable as a viewable property in Investigations and integrations.

Metric Customization

The simplest customization of all is at the metric level. The Persona’s pack comes with Metrics to represent all the Persona traits and their current Digital Experience Score in the scores that come with the pack. Unless all these Traits are required Nexthink recommends removing metrics that are not needed.

Should you wish to modify some of the metrics, it is simply a case of setting the metric as you wish, i.e. it can be a modification of the existing scoring to look for a different value, through to the complete definition of a new Persona Trait based on a new Nexthink data point.

Score Modification

Should you wish to modify the scoring system, take note of the following points:

• There are two scores in use:

  • Persona Traits – which contains the individual Traits plus the parent overall trait, so for example one measures usage of Teams, while the parent measures usage of Collaboration Tools.

    • Should you wish to modify these traits you may do so. Note that some of them refer back to Digital Experience Score categories, which Nexthink has done intentionally so that if DEX is configured for your Organization you utilize the existing configuration of this. In future releases of Personas we will integrate even more closely with DEX along these lines.

    • Should you wish to add new Traits, such as Business Applications we recommend using existing DEX Categories if possible first in your NXQL such as the Business Applications category. The advantage of using a Category is simplicity, however it means if you have multiple keywords in the Category then you will not be able to break down within the Persona Trait the usage of each individual keyword item.

    • Should you wish to remove Traits you may do so. As Nexthink releases packs which utilize Persona / Persona Traits’ in the future we will list the Persona’s we expect to be available.

  • Persona Traits Advanced – This Score is relating to sentiment (and in the future to remote action based Traits). The same rules apply to this as with the above Persona Traits score.

Note that the scores look for the activity over the past seven days, this should be kept as a standard in any new scores created.

Nexthink advises to use new scores for any new items defined. This will keep a separation of existence for future versions of the Persona Insights pack as future versions are released with updated content.

Customization Recommendations

Score Calculations

Always be clear on what you are trying to achieve with the Customization. In the released pack, there is a large number of Persona Traits.

The Personas are themselves intended to be examples of what is possible with the pack, such as Front and Back End Developer Traits.

Take the example of Cloud Storage Consumer. It is unlikely that your Organization is using all these cloud storage tools and as a result it is expected that the ones not in use will be removed. In addition the thresholds that have been set both in terms of the Persona Trait (which is based around amount of data transferred) and the Persona (which is based on the score of the Trait) will be tuned according to the actual data transfer values you see within your Organization.

Category Configuration

The pack is heavily linked to the Digital Experience Score Categories. There are some examples that can also be used in the “Application Profile” and “Job Role” Categories.

If you wish to move your Scores to using Category contents you are free to do so, which provides a slightly simpler UI experience, but does mean that if you have multiple entries in the Category you will not be able to break it down individually within the Score.

Use of Metrics

Metrics can be used to define Personas (or even Persona Traits) instead of using Scoring if wished. The advantage of using a Metric is that it is simple to do.

Recall that if metrics are used then each time you wish to re-use the same criteria you will have to create another metric. This is the drawback of using this approach. Given the Use Case that you are solving, think about whether you wish to use a Score, which is more involved but is a more flexible outcome, or a metric, which is simpler but if regularly used may end up being more work.