The Digital Workplace aims to provide employees with a high-performance, user-friendly workspace, similar to the applications they use in private life. The Digital Workplace’s ambition is to foster employees’ experience while empowering them. Today, it is a major challenge for a large number of companies, rather late in digitization. The digital workplace is, therefore, a lever for their digital transformation. A small inventory of the changes resulting from it.
The challenges of the next 15 years for IT
With the arrival of new generations in our workspaces, it is necessary to change the working space. “Digital Native” represents 30% of the workforce today, and this figure will increase to 75% by 2025. Generations Y and Z have new expectations. They are users who have grown up with new technologies. It became a habit to use them in their private lives and looking for the same functionalities in their professional life. IT professionals must develop applications that meet the needs of users while taking care of the ergonomics and the response times and access performance (mobility, different types of media). If the CIO does not adapt to these new collaborators, the risk is that they look for solutions themselves, outside the company’s Information System, which brings about a security failure. In order to minimize this phenomenon of Shadow IT (see our article Excel: the centerpiece of Shadow IT), it is essential that the CIO anticipates these needs and finds the appropriate solutions.
Another challenge facing the company is the mobility of employees. For Gartner, the digital enterprise “promotes the convergence of people, businesses, and objects”. The CIO must, therefore, provide mobile access to all the developed applications. Indeed, users are now looking to connect to their work tools no matter where they are. They do it from their professional equipment (during professional travel or in case of remote work), but also personal (from their smartphones at home).
Finally, today, technical support consumes between 50% to 70% of the IT budget of a company. In order to optimize costs while adapting to new labor organizations, the CIO must review its support service. This involves empowering employees by automating certain functions and by creating guides to assist in the reporting of incidents. This will save time and will make your colleagues more autonomous by acquiring reflexes (looking for a solution before calling the support service, for example). By being more and more autonomous, your employees will also be more productive.
Required CIO/ business collaboration in the construction of projects
Your role today is to make the link between the “digital workplace” and the Information System of your company while guaranteeing security. And for that, you have to collaborate with the different business departments. The success of this collaboration does not necessarily depend on the multiplicity of features, but on the management of the projects (see our article: CIO, become the hero of your company). Today, the CIO is not necessarily at the origin of all the IT projects (46% of the approaches are directed by the business departments), which is why a transversal communication is essential. The businesses will bring their expertise and skills to develop the functionalities they need, while the CIO will take care of the technical and data security aspects.
For example, you are likely to be asked to digitize business processes based on Excel spreadsheets. Rather than starting from scratch, you can keep the existing Excel workbooks, and convert them to structured forms with the Gathering Tools solution. Thus, you will not be to redefining the business problems but will be bringing a technical solution exploitable by everyone.
Employee nomadism, hyperconnectivity, shadow IT and digital workplace are today challenges that the CIO must face. Projects within companies are increasingly cross-cutting; new IT tools, communication and employee involvement in projects seem to be the key to a successful digital transformation.
