Collaboration in the Workplace of the Future — Boundaries are Irrelevant
If you are working in a typical company today, then you probably know who your manager is. You know who belongs to your team and who doesn’t. You may work daily with suppliers or partners — but you always know where the boundary lies between those within your company and those outside. Not only are those boundaries fairly clear, they can be fairly frustrating as you navigate IT systems that don’t integrate across those boundaries. So, you typically spend a great deal of your time jumping between IT systems and creating workarounds to connect the systems and the people.
Those days are numbered.
Imagine a not-too-distant future where many of these boundaries are irrelevant. In that future world, the digital transformation has radically reshaped the way companies do business. Many standardized roles are automated and the workforce has more strategic skills; freeing people from routine tasks and leaving those for machines. People are working in complex networks of teams, so emotional intelligence is key. Employees spend a large part of their day building collaborative partnerships across organizations. Why? Because in that future world, the 20th century goal of increasing organizational efficiency has long been replaced by the 21st century imperative to be more agile, innovative and digitally focused in ways that defy organizational boundaries and challenge people to work seamlessly within and outside of their organizations.
In that future, teams are working in self-managed ways. Leaders are managing people who report directly to them as well as those who don’t. Organizations are relying heavily on contractors and self-employed workers who bid on short-term tasks and projects. So increasingly, leaders are managing the performance of teams across traditional boundaries. And they are challenged every day to find the experts who can handle novel and unexpected situations. Those experts may or may not be part of their existing team. Customers are more demanding than ever. So, connecting the right problem solvers quickly, whether they are part of the team or not, and enabling them to collaborate is a constant challenge those leaders face.
That future requires tools to support collaboration between knowledge workers across organizational and IT boundaries. A tool that connects experts with data instantly within one system.
That tool is the SAP Knowledge Workspace.
It’s all about making connections and defying boundaries. Connecting knowledge workers with one another, and connecting those same experts to the data, tools, and context they need to address complex business scenarios. The SAP Knowledge Workspace is a collaborative space designed to bring together all necessary data, tools, and experts in one single case board to help the experts assess a situation, evaluate it, take a decision and act on it. Instead of wasting time jumping between systems and applications, doing things like updating spreadsheets or attaching data sheets to e-mails and sending them around, experts can dedicate their energies to actually addressing the issues. They can access — and work with — all the real-time data they need. There’s no key information hidden in someone’s inbox. It brings together systems information in an environment where knowledge workers can collaborate and make informed decisions in a single place. And importantly, it helps teams learn from their past experiences and apply their learnings to the next challenge. Nothings gets lost, since it is all part of the system of record.
That future may be closer than we think. SAP Knowledge Workspace.
