Tata Consultancy Services has deployed a Digital User Experience Monitoring tool on company-issued laptops used by its workforce of nearly 6 lakh employees, according to a report by Moneycontrol.
Sources cited in the report said the tool lets TCS view information such as the applications employees access and the time spent on each. Internally, the deployment is being read two ways: as a step to strengthen data security and prevent leaks, and as a way to gain tighter visibility into activity on company-owned devices.
TCS had not responded to Moneycontrol’s queries on the software vendor, the tool’s capabilities, the nature of employee data being collected, or who within the organisation can access it. The extent of the monitoring could not be independently verified, and it remains unclear whether the data is tied to individual employees, aggregated for IT and security teams, or visible to business managers.
Key details that remain undisclosed include the software’s name and vendor, the full range of its monitoring capabilities, whether employee-level data is collected, which teams can access it, and whether monitoring extends beyond system performance metrics. According to the report, the absence of any formal communication about the rollout has fuelled speculation among staff, even though monitoring tools are common across the IT and BPM sector.
“Digital experience monitoring can help organisations assess whether applications are functioning correctly, identify performance issues and understand user experience patterns,” said Pareekh Jain, CEO of research and advisory firm EIIRTrend, in comments to Moneycontrol. He added that similar technologies could also be used for surveillance purposes, depending on how organisations choose to deploy them.
Monitoring activity across a workforce approaching 600,000 employees also carries operational weight. A source cited in the report said measuring productivity would require looking beyond login hours to the nature of the work being done, which is harder because many employees operate through client-managed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Any attempt to monitor activity inside client VDIs could raise separate concerns around client confidentiality and data protection.
