Digital Workplace

Optimising your internal operational environment - the digital workplace

There are very few, if any organisations where the vast majority of their management and employees do not need to use computer systems in one way or another to market their products, operate their organisation, fulfil orders and manage their finances and employees. So enabling streamlined access to these systems and associated company information is an essential aspect of maximising employee productive, performance and operational excellence.

The ‘digital workplace’ provides the opportunity to bring all the company communications, inter and intra teams communications, corporate knowledge, information (files and documents), data-bases, training materials, processes, system tools and access into line of business applications into a structured intelligent online framework ‘zone’ or intelligent intranet designed to be easy to navigate, and personalised to the needs of the individual member of staff. For companies that embrace mobile working, it allows access (via appropriate security) from any location, not just within the physical office.

In essence, it encompasses all of the technologies staff use to do their jobs, ranging from HR, Finance, CRM applications and all core business applications to e-mail, instant messaging, enterprise social media tools, intranets and portals.

As the workplace becomes digital, the whole workforce and upper management can communicate and collaborate in many new and effective ways. This digital workforce can combine productive business relationships beyond the natural work groups enables knowledge sharing across the organisation.

For successful adoption, which demonstrates clear business value, it must make it easier for staff to carry out their day-to-day responsibilities, so must be simple and intuitive to use, and enable appropriate linkage and integration with the other technology systems used within the company (e.g. Microsoft Office or G-mail apps, SharePoint, corporate people directory, holiday request / staff rota systems etc..). Good implementations enable effective ‘behind the scenes’ automation of core internal processes.

The digital workplace can be viewed is to be a virtual equivalent to the physical workplace. The organisational journey required to achieve value requires strong planning and management due to its fundamental role in people's productivity, engagement and working health.

Key considerations include:

Organizational Culture - e.g. controlling v empowering, risk appetite, need to know v (reasonably) open and transparent, potential constraints of external (regulatory) environment
Putting people first - the impact on employees is what makes the digital workplace important
A technology layer - advances in technology are driving changes in the digital workplace, and this is what makes it a current issue.
Management and design - proactively developing a digital workplace means addressing it as a whole and coordinating between technology, process and people.

There are many technology products which aim to provide either some or many of the core capabilities and framework upon which a digital workplace can be developed (e.g. from Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Jive).

A less well-known provider, with whom Re-envisageIT has formed a non-exclusive Ambassador partnership in the UK, is:

Their flexible product does provides some great capabilities to enable the building of a full functioned digital workplace, as outlined above. It offers a great basis for many, particularly small to mid-size organisations (UK based or global) to develop and iterate a very capable digital workplace environment in a cost-effective manner.