Present day productivity is no more quantified by the number of hours. Instead, there is a major paradigm shift in the way we measure a person’s productivity. The major yardstick is how efficiently and effectively was an organizational process accomplished.
Although technology has immensely streamlined organizational processes, this by no means implies that the element of human capital has gone redundant. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite. The need for high quality human resource is more than ever in today’s constantly evolving business environment.
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Intro to Digital Workspace
At first, the mere term Digital Workspace seems somewhat overwhelming to us. In reality, the term is not as scary and works as a roadmap for achieving organizational goals in the most effective manner. Let’s first draw an outline of the modern digital workspace.
Consider the digital workspace as a cohesive and unified technology driven platform to manage an organization’s business critical data , applications and computing resources. A well planned and orchestrated digital workspace is rapidly becoming a critical success factor in the modern working environment.
Let’s first outline a few hallmarks of an effective digital workspace: –
Virtualized Infrastructure
The era of on-premise data centers in fast approaching its logical end. It is no more viable for even medium to large enterprises to keep pumping millions of valuable dollars in expensive data centers on premise.
The solution is virtualization of the IT infrastructure and outsourcing it to a suitable Cloud Service Provider (CSP) that will take care of all the hardware and its ancillary redundancies.
Such virtualization extends to both computing and productivity resources, as best results can only be attained by employing a combination of these business critical resources.
Collaboration
Any virtualized environment is highly geared towards employee collaboration. A secure and unified platform ensures employees of the same functional area or even cross functional teams can maintain close interaction.
Management
When your infrastructure has been virtualized, you need minimal IT resources to manage it. This in turn will reduce the component of fixed and operating costs, thus sparing funds for more productive avenues.
Security
A virtualized and unified architecture is much easier to secure as compared to an on premise solution. Firstly, it eliminates the need for physical security of the on-premise data centers altogether.
So far as cyber security is concerned, a unified data store is way easier to secure as compared to data that is scattered across multiple end point devices and physical locations.
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Efficiency
A digital workspace ensures efficiency by allowing employees round the clock access to their work across multiple device platforms. This inherent flexibility triggers employee motivation and productivity on the go.
Now that we have covered the defining characteristics of a digital workspace, let’s cover how this correlates with achieving organizational goals.
User Experience
At the end of day, the primary users of a digitally powered workspace are the very employees of an organization. The first thing digitization brings is flexibility. Employees can access their workloads and assigned business processes from any location of their suiting.
What this means is that an employee can remain productive from the physical workspace, home and even while on the move. The other aspect of a digitally powered workspace is multi platform access. An employee can access work over the office desktop, laptop, tablet or even smartphone, which is ideal for productivity.
To top that off, when productivity applications also get seamlessly integrated with the digital environment, it creates a highly productive platform for employees to exhibit their skills. Productivity apps can also be assigned across employees purely on the basis of organizational role.
All the above facets of a well-conceived digital workspace will ensure a very positive user experience for employees. This will motivate employees to enhance productivity as maximum time will be expended on actual productivity, rather than trivial support tasks leading to no quantifiable outcome.
Data Security
Once an organization both virtualizes and unifies its data, the physical security of end point devices is no longer a worry. Even if an end point device is lost or stolen, no critical data is at risk as the individual device does not house any such data. Each user must pass multiple layers of authentication before access to data is granted.
Network Management
In a digital workspace, all the processes are channelized through the organizational network in a streamlined way. This makes the task of network management and monitoring convenient. Such an architecture is much easier to manage and identify any anomalies in the routine network traffic.
Even if a nefarious actor is able to infiltrate such an organization’s network, it is highly likely to be identified timely, before any serious damage can be inflicted. A virtualized network can otherwise be compartmentalized, strictly based on organizational roles and requirement, so that access to data is strictly on a need basis.
This segregation of network on the basis of organizational needs and roles will otherwise act as an additional barrier against cyber attacks. Even if a malicious actor gains access to the organization’s internal network, it will be limited to a single or few select segments. This is a great measure for containing the damage from any breach.
Resource Allocation
In a traditional deployment, an organization’s IT managers are severely handicapped when it comes to allocating computing or productivity resources. Either you give an employee full access to some business area or no access at all. In a digital workspace, the allocation of these resources can be micro managed.
As productivity apps are also virtualized in the digitized workspace, IT managers can decide which individual apps would be required by employees performing a particular organizational task. Firstly, this will reduce the cost component by commissioning apps that are actually required for the role in question.
Secondly, this will enhance employee productivity as they would not be wasting precious time over switching between applications that are not even required. A virtualized architecture can also be used to unify productivity apps in a super-efficient package so that employees no longer waste time in switching applications.
Mobile Workforce
The present needs of workforce are evolving at a rapid pace. Now, employees are less interested in monetary compensation and more in flexible working hours and conditions. At times, a prospective employee may insist on working remotely without physically showing up for work.
Only a robust digital workspace can make this happen. A remote employee sitting at even the remotest corner of the globe can add value to an organization. This is made possible by giving a secure gateway to access both organizational data and enterprise applications.
In this way, the first benefit organizations can extract from digitizing their workspace is they can attract the best human capital, regardless of physical location. Secondly, it also translates into cost savings as remote workers often tend to cost less in terms of compensation. They would also not be utilizing the organization’s infrastructure.
Process Automation
When we analyze organizational processes, there are quite a few of them which are purely of a repetitive nature. By leveraging a digital architecture, most of such processes can be automated. This will introduce efficiency and also free up human resources for crafting out of the box solutions to organizational challenges.
Conclusion
We are quickly entering an era where a unified and well-orchestrated digital workspace will be the norm rather than exception. What’s important is that organizations start orientating themselves with various facets of digitization and identify areas of opportunity.
Without much doubt, enterprises that adopt a proactive approach towards the goal of digitization and virtualization shall enjoy a unique heads up and competitive edge over lagging industry players. However, any success will largely hinge on proper planning for any such architecture and a strong commitment to this objective.
