How DaaS and DEX help CPOs cut IT spend through user personas

As experts in maximizing financial resources, Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) know how to get value for money. A 2025 procurement industry survey found that 46% of CPOs consider reducing operational costs to be a high priority over the next 12 months. Recently, CPOs have turned their focus to two CapEx-turned-OpEx IT investments that yield savings over time: device as a service (DaaS) and digital employee experience (DEX). Growth-stage enterprises are focusing more on these cost-saving levers to free up and reallocate IT spend to revenue-generating activities.

Visibility first: DaaS and DEX initiatives require eyes on your IT ecosystem

At their core, DaaS and DEX are methods of addressing the needs of your workforce, one for IT assets (DaaS) and the other for how employees use those assets (DEX). Accordingly, any organization that seeks to optimize these two areas should start by seeking greater visibility of their respective domains. But how do you design DaaS and DEX initiatives that will meet your users’ needs? Start by building user personas.

Defined user personas establish an enterprise-wide understanding of the user types within your workforce. This granular insight into the specific technologies, applications, and networks each user category relies on empowers IT directors to make data-driven decisions. Naturally, data-driven decisions compounded over time create major cost-saving opportunities.

What are the benefits of creating user personas?

Creating and analyzing your organization’s user personas unlocks multiple downstream benefits for IT directors and their teams across DaaS and DEX.

• Streamlined issue resolution: IT teams can group users within the same service category and hardware environment, enabling a single remediation to address an issue affecting an entire user community.
• Prioritization of key user groups: IT teams can identify and prioritize essential user groups such as C-level executives, mission-critical operations staff, or customer-facing service representatives.
• Enhanced outage assessment and management: IT teams can assess the impact of outages, assign severity levels, and prioritize incident resolution across affected user groups more quickly, efficiently, and comprehensively.

Cost-saving strategies come into clearer focus with user personas

For DaaS and DEX, the persona analysis process inevitably identifies cost-saving actions, including the reclamation of unused SaaS subscription licenses. Organizations waste an average of $21 million annually on unused SaaS subscription licenses, a 14% increase from the previous year. Compounding the issue, organizations drastically underestimate their SaaS costs by a shocking 304%.

By aligning SaaS investments with actual usage patterns, organizations can curb excess spending and drive smart procurement decisions. CPOs will also appreciate how an informed software reclamation process can simplify software vendor audits and support sustainability initiatives.

User personas fuel the insight required for intelligent refreshes

Adding another benefit to the list, user persona data insights simplify the ongoing question of when to refresh hardware. Rather than refreshing based on equipment age, user personas allow organizations to refresh based on need, creating additional cost-saving opportunities. By refreshing what isn’t working and waiting to refresh what is, organizations can conduct right-time refreshes. This becomes increasingly valuable in deploying devices across distributed workforces and balancing device fleet standardization with personalization.

Persona analysis: The key to visibility and strategic IT optimization

With properly defined user personas, your organization can allocate resources effectively, optimize IT investments, enhance operational efficiency, and save money.

SHI’s Sr. Director of End User Solutions Michael McCracken says, “When starting your DEX journey, you need to truly understand your digital personas. Knowing each of your groups’ differing requirements will help you identify gaps in your experience and prioritize what your first steps should be.”

As DaaS and DEX continue to offer real pathways to IT maturity, it’s clear both spaces are here to stay. Unsurprisingly, the DaaS industry is forecasted to be worth a staggering $3 billion, with a 39.5% compound annual growth rate. Likewise, according to Gartner®, “through 2027, 75% of organizations without a DEX strategy and tool will fail to successfully reduce digital friction.” [1] For these and many other reasons, getting familiar with how user personas can optimize your IT service delivery is a smart move.

How can you get started with DaaS and DEX? SHI is here to help

Starting any technology initiative with an early conversation with SHI is a great way to solve what’s next. Would your organization benefit from improved:

• Cost optimization: Think reclaiming or reallocating unused licensing, or building a device refresh calendar based on need rather than a clock.
• Operational efficiency: Wouldn’t it be nice to resolve dozens of IT tickets by rolling out a single fix to your sales team user persona group at once?
• User prioritization: During unplanned downtime, user personas enable your IT team to get your mission-critical executives and teams up and running first.

Both our DaaS and DEX services are underpinned by SHI’s decades of expertise and extensive partnerships. Plus, our unique vendor-neutral approach ensures you can source the right devices and peripherals to meet your end users’ needs.

For more information on how user personas can propel your DaaS and DEX initiatives, contact SHI’s modern workplace services team.

1 Gartner, Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Employee Experience Management Tools, 26 May 2025

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