Most of the CIOs hear from their team that employees want to collaborate dynamically as the expectations of theworkplace have seen tremendous changes due to new millennials’ induction into the workforce and advanced personal technologies that are occupying enterprise space. Though CIOs expect their team to collaborate dynamically, they cannot do it using old model, tools, and procedures that operate current workplaces. The new expectation is agility in work environment equipped with modern tools, technologies to facilitate office technologies for collaboration and boundaryless so that devices and locations do not restrict access to resources.

CIOs expect their IT organizations to become agile by sensing and responding to business requirements promptly. Their focus on agility is to deliver the outcomes that business needs. Also, the employees of today, want to connect and access content from anywhere, anytime quickly, and across any device. The workspace of the future will, therefore, need to meet these expectations by being hyper-resilient and agile; workload-centric; and device, platform, network, and provider agnostic. A traditional workspace, with its rigid attributes like one device, one platform, one network and one provider, creates challenges for the IT team to manage the current expectations set by both – the business and the end user (see Figure 1). 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 end user and drive a change in the end user experience.

The new fluid workspace has to be constructed with the intention of enabling enterprise productivity with ease of access that fulfills next-gen workforce demands. In other words, it should focus, not on devices, but on users’ productivity, along with the user experience.

An enterprise will require a clear roadmap to reach the future state of the live workspace from the existing monolithic workspace. The strategy should enable users to improve their experience with IT Services, rather than restrict the services.

How to build a digital workspace

Business growth has become a top priority for most of the CEOs, and they look at IT to enable it using new technologies. Digital workplace is a fit for purpose for the new millennials modern workforce and inclusive of consumer technologies that are becoming a new industrial strength. Both CEO & CIO are looking for business innovation in their workplace with an ability to adapt and respond to changes in the market.

The new digital workspace (see Figure 2) stresses upon using modern tools, policies, technologies, workload delivery models, platforms to create a collaborative office ecosystem; thus, the user can enable the workspace at any place.

The new fluid workspace has to be constructed with the intention of enabling enterprise productivity with ease of access that fulfills next-gen workforce demands.

The key characteristics of the digital workspace will include the following:

1. IT service provisioning
2. Storefront for service enablement
3. Intelligent SSO & IDAM
4. Workload delivery
5. Security
6. Unified device, apps, data
7. Self H2A
8. User experience
   

The enterprise IT team, along with architects and business IT users, should create 3 maps—Strategy map, Roadmap and Journey map. This will help to build a future-ready digital workspace. The strategy should encapsulate the following points:

• Focus on user-centric approach, as compared to device-centric
• Workspace provisioning using fusion delivery model (on-premises, public Cloud, private Cloud and hybrid Cloud-based VDI or desktop delivery)
• Data security that follows data and not devices
• Evolve an inclusive device support policy comprising BYODs
• Walk-in café or technology parlor to socialize and resolve issues

The Strategy map should represent the overall vision, goals and future capabilities; Roadmap should detail project initiatives, capabilities and outcome on a time-bound manner; and the Journey map should provide a holistic view of how a transaction/interaction would be fulfilled.

Five steps to digital workspace

An enterprise would need a clear strategy (see Figure 3) to build the future-ready workspace that is agile, user-centric, secure, targeted and flexible.

A digital workspace would mean productivity improvements 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, released from old technology constraints. Use of self-heal and self-help would mark a considerable improvement in end users’

omnichannel experience. This, in turn, would lead to elimination or minimization of field support. Availability of data in the Cloud would also help to avoid device dependence to access or store data. In brief, a digital workspace would lead to a safe, secure and easy-to-access IT services and cost savings in the range of 10%–20%. Moreover, of course, a happy and productive workforce!