Digital Workplaces, people to virtual offices

From papers to paperless offices, and now to people to virtual offices, enterprises are adopting digital technologies in a big way to create digital workplaces

By Rashi Varshney

In the digital era, employees seek access to resources and data anywhere, at any time and using any device without having a compulsion to be physically present in the office. The exponential adoption of mobile and cloud has become a boon for enterprises having large number of offshore centers and border-less workplaces, which is why they are adopting digital workplaces in a big way.

The advent of Digital Workplaces

A digital workplace is a virtual environment that the IT function creates and delivers to end-users and the environment that end-users leverage for anytime, anywhere access to business critical applications and desktops using any device running on any platform.

A digital workplace enables organizations to target key areas of improvement, shifting core business processes and operations to a mobile model. This transformation has the potential to make organizations more competitive and there by more successful. This trend is bound to accelerate as more and more employees use mobility functions for transforming their work. For instance, according to Global Mobile Workforce Forecast, 2015-2020, the global mobile workforce is set to increase from 1.32 billion in 2014, to 1.75 billion in 2020.

A case in point which highlights how a digital workplace can be an advantage, is Vodafone. The telecom giant was looking to unify hardware, software, and services from multiple catalogs into one to improve overall productivity and cut support cost. Vodafone deployed a software solution from BMC called ‘MyIT Self Service’ to empower employees with self-service access to the answers and tools they need based on their location, role, and preferences. Available through a desktop or laptop browser, or through a mobile app, MyIT is suited for the company’s highly distributed and mobile workforce. The company is now reaping uninterrupted productivity from 1,50,000 people, working from office, home, or away.
BMC, a software giant itself has a large part of its product development workforce in Pune and has embraced mobile workplace in a big way. The IT giant has adopted its own mobility solutions to ensure that the employees can access resources securely from anywhere through various computing devices including smartphones.

Another case point is Intelenet, a large global Business Process Outsourcing player, which is now witnessing a scenario where all its management processes and approvals are being made through the mobile.

Rajendra Deshpande , Chief Information Officer, Intelenet Global Services told that the company has deployed various mobility solutions such as employee assistance on mobile. The company realized that Intelenet’s 80% of employees are youth and the traditional method of interacting with them was undergoing a huge transformation. “Our solution now allows us a new mode for interacting with our employees especially the youth which is through mobile and social media,” he told.

Intelenet has also opted for micro training, which means with the help of technology, the firm is breaking training modules into bite size and sending it on mobiles for employee consumption. This has enabled the company to increase worker productivity with an integrated mobile workplace.

“We have also deployed mobification of Corporate Policy Awareness, under which we have condensed our corporate policy for consumption on mobile and have now made this available via the internet moving beyond the organizational intranet,” added Deshpande.

Not only large enterprises, but businesses of all sizes are creating a digital workplace, delivering anywhere , anytime access to all, apps, services and resources across all devices-desktops, tablets, and smartphones. For instance, Safexpress, one of the key logistics and supply chain Management Company, provides high-speed, door-to-door delivery services for commercial goods and cargo throughout India. The company sought to deploy tablets and rugged hand-held terminals to about 1,500 delivery vehicle drivers. It also sought to provide communication and CRM tools to its business development and customer account management teams, and arm its operations managers located throughout India with mobile devices to enhance decision making. The deployment of AirWatch-VMWare helped the company to enhance its delivery operations by capturing real-time data and in providing speedy updates to the transport management system and in improving its efficiency by tracking the company’s workforce.

“For years, businesses have struggled to address the proliferation of mobile devices, playing defence against employees with their own devices and customers with mobile-driven expectations. CIOs very often rank mobility at the top of their list of priorities, but mobility is not just transforming business – its transfixing business. While the potential for business transformation is huge, very few companies have begun leveraging mobility to its full potential. A recent survey of 1,000 customers conducted by VMware found that as of today only 17 percent of global companies have shifted a core business process to a mobile model,” said Ramesh Vantipalli, Director EUC – Systems Engineering – VMware India.

Apps, Analytics, & Collaboration

Digital Workplace comprises solutions to the four pillars of the digital workplace: apps and desktop, unified end-point management, collaboration and identity, as well as security. Speaking about trends and pillars, Manoj Kumbhat is Senior Vice-President and CIO of a global technology company HCL Technologies told about the digital journey at HCL. He said that the company has three major tenets of digital focus areas — digital apps, digital analytics, and digital workplace of the future.
“In this specific area of digital workplace of the future, we have three specific business goals. We want to drive more consumer like IT experience for our young workforce. We also want to ensure that our employees are engaged to deliver discretionary work. And lastly it is also about ensuring that we are able to deliver a seamless experience across different work environments that we work in,” Kumbhat elaborated.

Key trends reshaping the workplace

Intelenet Global Services’s CIO Rajendra Deshpande, says that some of the technology and trends that are reshaping today’s work environment to facilitate innovative working practices are Enterprise social media tools, Virtual meeting tools, Cloud and Mobility solutions, Analytics tools and Multi-Channel approach towards processes.

“Speaking of cloud, it has enabled businesses reap huge benefits by offering them increasing flexibility, 24×7 access to data, cost saving and security. Some of the trends that we are witnessing today is that of companies gravitating towards a public cloud from a private cloud for better facilities and to avoid the complications of managing a private server. Additionally mobility applications, collaboration software solutions and tools are also being hosted and enabled via cloud,” Deshpande elaborates.

Talking about Mobility, he says that that these solutions are unlocking value for employees as well customers. “Mobility Solutions enable real-time access to information, making it easier for the decision makers to take decisions instantly. These solutions also integrate infrastructure with processes thereby providing seamless business continuity in operations, reduced costs and improved service delivery,” he said.

According to a research, by 2020, millennials are expected to make up over a third of the workforce worldwide. Talking about the youth dominated work environment, Malav Kapadia, Global Director & Head of Indian Outsourcing Partners, BMC Software said that employees now expect to access the resources & data they need anywhere, at any time and using any device. “The ubiquitous nature of cloud and exponential adoption of all mobile platforms have made the digital/mobile workplace a reality. Steep fall in the cost of hosting, storage, connectivity and hand-held hardware has made mobile workplace a reality,” he added.

Some key trends Kapadia pointed out around Cloud are, growth in hybrid cloud adoption, decreasing concern around security, exponential shift of enterprise workloads to private cloud as well as DevOps and SecOps led cloud adoption. “On the Enterprise mobility side we clearly see a surge in Custom Apps and increased focus on security and agility to allow a workforce to go mobile and be more productive,” he said.

Jai Ganesh, Vice President & Head Mphasis NEXT Labs, Mphasis puts the trend of digital workplaces in five points, which are empowerment, engagement, experience, inclusivity, and insights. “Empowerment means, enabling the employees, and partners to collaborate better through more effective collaboration mechanisms which are quite different from the earlier email based collaboration,” says he.

Engagement is another significant factor in a digital workplace, “Even if we have the best tools, best practices or incentives in place, but unless the employees are engaged in terms of leveraging the digital workplaces to their potential, it becomes a failure. And, experience drives engagement” says Ganesh.
Besides, differently-able people are also a part of many workplaces. Highlighting the same, Ganesh said that inclusivity is often ignored in designing and developing by many of the digital workplace enablers. “The workplaces should not only be easy place to work, but it should also have inclusiveness in terms for people of all walks of life, people with different abilities to engage and to effectively communicate and engage,” he pointed out.

Security – a key factor

While bringing end-user experience and simplified IT management, preserving reliability and security is a critical business requirement. As Madu Ratnayake, EVP/CIO & Head of Business Process Excellence of VirtusaPolaris puts it, security is a third word after cloud and mobility.

Ratnayake says that digital workplaces comes with two major challenges as the young workforce is looking for a millennial, but on the flip side of that is security. So, there are two facets of this structuring — one where the employees of the global structure work in a free manner and on the other hand customers or employers are looking for a more controlled environment. “We are driving mobility for productivity. However, one must note that mobility and cloud can hugely impact security,” says he.

More Roadblocks

While IT leaders and CIOs are rethinking the way IT infrastructure is being deployed or managed to satisfy the needs of a digitally savvy workforce, the challenges of managing a huge number of desktops and associated applications, spread across multiple time zones and locations can prove to be a herculean task. While the potential for business transformation is huge, very few companies have begun leveraging mobility to its full potential. A recent survey of 1,000 customers conducted by VMware found that as of today only 17 percent of global companies have shifted a core business process to a mobile model.

BMC’s Kapadia, says that desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones and other access devices present one set of challenges and the applications or the backend systems have their own set of unique challenges. Says he, ”Some key questions that a CIO grapples with include: How do I give choice of devices but at the same time make sure they are secure? How do I give employees all the resources they need to be productive across all the devices? How do I make apps intuitive and fast on the mobile? How do I simplify user experience and provide consumer style self service? How do I create role based access and control for the employees? At the underlying infrastructure level the challenges are different but equally important, how do I manage all the data/apps/hardware that are now on cloud? How do I keep it all secure? The workforce is thin on patience how do I roll-out changes and new apps at the pace they expect? How do I automate workflows and workloads so that they can seamlessly get executed across all the different cloud options and yet make changes on the fly?”.

However these are the challenges after certain level of deployment of digital workplace. The journey towards the digital transformation too poses a set of challenges. “The common problem we all face during the journey is that the transition of desktop site to mobile app is not smooth,” shares Maheshwar Kumar singh, Business Analyst at Tally Solutions.

Moreover general issues such as Internet connectivity in India also poses a challenge for digital workplace success in India. While speaking about the technology challenges holding back an enterprise, Murthy Mulugu, Group CTO at Palred Technologies Limited said that Internet network connectivity remains an issue.

With respect to BPOs which usually have larger number of offshore centres and employees working across geographies with different time zone, Deshpande of Intelenet points out some of the real challenges which BPOs encounter. “Many organizations invest in productivity technology but do not sufficiently integrate it with their business applications. Others lack sufficient IT infrastructure,” he said. Intelenet Global Services works across 8 geographies viz North & Central America- USA, Guatemala, Europe –UK & Poland, Asia-Pacific – India, Philippines, Middle East – UAE, Saudi Arabia and are a 55,000 strong company servicing about 100 + clients across sectors.

Telling about the challenges of a huge number of desktops and associated applications spread across different regions and multiple time zones, he told that Intelenet have deployed solutions and platforms to centralize the management which benefits the firm in overall servicing of all clients across regions. “We make use of Patch Management and Power Management software centrally which is further enhanced by various tools such as Microsoft SCCM. This enables us in the centralized management of our desktops as well as associated applications,” says Deshpande.

While companies, in an effort to make their workforces more agile and productive in the digital age are switching to best technologies, some cultural hurdles come as a huge part of their journey. According to Ratnayake of VirtusaPolaris, mindset or attitude towards technology especially in Asia is a big challenge during the journey of digital workplace. “People do not see things such as sharing a document or sharing a password as a serious issue. So we try to use millennial ways like gamified trainings to educate employees on these issues,” says he.

Digital Workplace essentials

Adding to the challenges, CIOs spells out a few essentials which are required to create a strong digital workplace environment. Ajay Bakshi, Chief Digital Officer & Sr. VP-Business Transformation of Aegis Limited said that there are 4000 people, but problem of digital workplace is with those 2000 people who are outside office premises. “Certain menu of the mobile apps should be restricted to access outside the office premises owing to security and information,” says he.

Speaking about security and agility, HCL’s Kumbhat says that their customers expect a lot of agility in the infrastructure, and they expect ability to secure their infrastructure in a manner that data is protected. “We also work in an environment where we are in highly regulated industries like banking and healthcare, and defence. So, it’s extremely important that the infrastructure we have is secured and is in compliance to the regulatory requirements of a lot of customer industries we work in. And, we also have to ensure that the end infrastructure, which our employees are using, that it has the right level of security controls and it is not adding any vulnerability to our customer infrastructure,” said Kumbhat.
“As the idea of a Digital workplace is gaining traction, it is also important that we make a cost-effective workplace that accrues us maximum benefits with minimum capital investment,” said Deshpande.

Suggesting CIOs regarding digital workplaces, Vantipalli said that before investing in a proposed application, it is important that employers assess the level of their workers’ trust in the application solution in order to download it to their personal devices and grant permissions for management.

Future: Bots at Work

The journey of digital workplace is nothing but bringing in disruptive value-added elements led by new age technologies like mobility, mobile devices, cloud, social media and collaboration tools. Hence, the posture of digital workplace will change every time with new technology, and the journey will continue till the best. For instance, at present enterprises are already opting for, or will opt for automation to reduce manual intervention by leveraging emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. With respect to BPOs, Deshpande predicts that automation will redefine relationships. “Having exhausted the opportunities to move work to lower-cost people, ITO and BPO firms should look to on moving it to machines. Buyers with contracts designed to purchase people will need to reconcile their contracts to this new world. Both customers and providers will have to rethink their deals as they integrate more robotic process automation (RPA) into IT service delivery,” he elaborated.

He also added that offshore captives will boom up as companies will leverage the experience they have gained in process maturity as a result of working with outsourced offshore teams and set up their own shops. “This will allow for reduced costs, by taking away the provider’s margin, as well as increase flexibility by removing contractual constraints,” Deshpande said.

Echoing the same view as Deshpande, Head of Digital of VirtusaPolaris feels that a company should be able to provide environment where the workforce actually can work in from anywhere. He said that in BPOs, work is getting automated. In the future, service operators in BPOs will be bots with the help of artificial intelligence.

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