How to craft a digital workspace

In this world, leaders want their teams to leverage the latest technologies and collaborate dynamically. In fact, they’d like their teams to want to collaborate dynamically. The question is how leaders and teams achieve this goal with the archaic models, tools and procedures currently being used.

"The workplace of the future will therefore need to meet these expectations by being hyper resilient, agile, workload centric and agnostic to device, platform, network and provider.”

A traditional workspace with rigid attributes like one device, one platform, one network and one provider creates challenges for IT to manage expectations set by both the business and the user.

{CF_IMAGE}

The new fluid workspace must be constructed with the intention of enabling enterprise productivity with ease of access, which fulfils next-gen workforce demands. In other words it should focus less on devices and more on user productivity - along with the experience.

A digital workplace with the combined force of social, mobile, cloud and analytics can help meet the immediate and long-term requirements of the business and the user, while also driving change in the end user experience.

A modern CIO’s agenda should inevitably include three key workplace transformation pillars - simplification, digitisation and automation.

Connect

Employees today want to connect and access content anywhere, anytime and quickly, across any device. This requires organisations to exploit content, data and technologies to the maximum extent possible.

The workplace of the future will therefore need to meet these expectations by being hyper resilient, agile, workload-centric and agnostic to device, platform, network and provider.

Products and services which are simple to navigate, clear and not over-engineered are winners in the marketplace. Some older processes are not as simple or fast as they need to be.

Simplification enables employees to do business better, improve their performance and productivity and drive innovation. This requires processes to be reimagined, workflows to be simplified and transactions to be redesigned.

Automation via technologies such as BOTs, robotic process automation (RPA), custom scripts and tools can be incorporated in various areas of the organisation for agile and swift processes, leading to reduction in turnaround times as well as cost of operations across devices.

Technologies at the digital frontier such as, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), advanced statistical modelling and pattern detection capabilities can significantly enhance the user experience, efficiency and effectiveness across devices, technologies and platforms.

As the focus shifts from function-centricity to the end-user, agile and design thinking are being adopted as a way of working to build persona-driven, intuitive, simple and context aware applications.

To provide such a seamless user experience across all enterprise applications it is necessary to consolidate processes and eliminate complexity from systems.

{CF_IMAGE}

Having a mobile-first approach built on a solid foundation of cloud services is at the core of a holistic workplace transformation strategy.

Organisations are launching enterprise mobile applications with an analytics core, for enhanced user experience and increased productivity.

This helps employees to make decisions on-the-go and in real-time. Transactions enabled with analytics ensure quicker turnaround cycles, effective outputs and better governance of processes. 

Wipro’s transformation

A few years ago, Wipro’s landscape consisted of more than 800 business and transaction applications, five different knowledge applications in silos and six different helpdesks. This compartmentalisation led to loss of productivity, high operational costs and low customer satisfaction.

With a view to digitise, Wipro wanted to eliminate duplication and complexity by unifying its services. It consolidated processes and transactions, adopted a mobile-first and cloud-first approach for applications and also enabled touchless processing.

Out of this the group created Confluence, an umbrella platform that consolidated all applications seamlessly in order to cash in on the value chain. At Wipro, simplification is driven as a program to make processes, applications and transactions leaner thus leading to enhanced user experience and optimised costs. Smarter transactions with quicker finishes was at the core of simplification.

Another approach taken is to redesign the processes, remove the complexities and make them smarter and nimble while ensuring all required controls are in place.

This relinquishes the need for having managers visit different applications to approve requests. The expense reimbursement process has been made paperless across categories and geographies.

Under Wipro’s integrated helpdesk MyHelpline, transaction time has improved from 15 minutes to only two clicks, and the cycle time brought down from two weeks to three days. This has led to a 30 per cent reduction in backend staff and 20 per cent cost saving. 

{CF_IMAGE}

The end-user customer experience is the primary focus of workplace transformation at Wipro. 

Five steps to a digital workspace

An enterprise would need a clear strategy to build a future-ready workspace which is agile, user-centric, secure, targeted and flexible.

{CF_IMAGE}

A new way of working is facilitated by reorganising team structures, processes and user experiences which translates into adoption of technologies and new behavioural changes.

Each step of the strategy which comprises the roadmap to a digital workplace, needs to consider the below steps.

{CF_IMAGE}

A digital workspace would mean improved productivity due to faster boot-up time, on-demand applications and data on the cloud.

It would also unleash creativity and innovation as employees discover new and seamless ways to collaborate, ideate and iterate with colleagues, while breaking free from old technology constraints.

This would lead to elimination or minimisation of field support. Availability of data in the cloud would also help avoid device dependence to access or store data.

In a nutshell, a digital workspace would lead to safe, secure and easy-to-access IT services which supports a happy and productive workforce.

Kavitha Kadambi is General Manager of Transformation Programs at Wipro. Wipro is a technology services partner with ANZ.