Here’s What No one Tells You About Digital Workplace in 2019

Going “Digital” is not just slang anymore; it is the reality now. The Pathways to Digital Enablement survey found the work completed by using automation among North American companies doubled over the last three years from 6% to 12% and is expected to nearly double to 23% in the next three years. We have seen a steady increase in the number of organizations developing a digital workplace strategy or program, with implementation of core platforms also underway. Automation and digitalization are powering new combinations of work, talent, skill requirements and work relationships.

Digital workplace combines multitude of elements to garner outcomes that are both effective and employee engaging. Elements such as leadership, culture, technology and practices to yield outcomes that impact both employee and execution efficiency. Digital transformation is more of a journey and for the most part it is a never-ending journey. Both the organization and the employees benefit from the digital workplace experience, which ultimately is user friendly too.

Organizations use different methods to develop digital capabilities. Those that progress to the level where they are able to effectively partner with start-ups reap many benefits, including leveraging technology that can’t be built quickly internally, increasing agility on new initiatives, bringing innovative ideas and perspectives in-house, and working with top talent. But doing so requires the ability to identify the right start-ups with whom to work, and ensuring your organization has the required time, governance process and resources, including an adequate budget.

The bigger picture still shows that the collective digital workplace journey is slow, there are many encouraging signs of progress. Nearly two-thirds of organizations included in the survey already have a digital workplace program in place. More and more organizations have put Digital Transformation as a high-priority item in their term plan. 65% have already implemented a digital transformation strategy in place which is a whopping 20% increase in the last two years.

Key Takeaways from The State of Digital Workplace survey:

• Digitalization and process improvement rank higher on the priority list while Learning and development and improvement of customer service ranked on the lower spectrum. Knowledge management and staying up to date with business culture and adapting to change ranked averagely.
• In a number of organizations, lack of support from the top management is interfering with the progress in the digital transformation. This along with budget constraints and competing initiatives and/or departments have been discovered as challenges along this digital transformation journey.
• Digital Transformation requires huge investment and a well-informed decision needs to be taken before said investment is made. In most of the organizations, investment decisions are taken by C-suite/Executive or Information Technology department. Others include Human Resource, Line of Business et cetera.
• Larger organizations focus more on Enterprise service center, Intranet/employee portal and mobile service capability as compared to smaller organizations. Meanwhile, smaller organizations focus more on forms and workflows.
• Document management, Enterprise search, Group Chat/ Team collaboration tools, Knowledge Management and Mobile enablement rank higher among important tech development needed whilst Micro services, Idea management and Integrated task centers rank on the lower end of the spectrum.
• Most of these are in the works or satisfactory when it comes to their implementation. Knowledge Management albeit being one of the more important aspects still isn’t perfected yet and needs work.
• Email, Group Chat/Team collaboration tools, Enterprise service center also rank higher when it comes to availability of existing programs and its maturity level.
• Despite the noise surrounding AI and Machine Learning, organizations are prioritizing traditional technologies such as document management over more disruptive younger cousins.
• Organizations which are mature and mid-way with their digital transformation have exclaimed that they use agile methodologies most of the time but overall organizations follow interactive approach which may or may not be agile.

While these technology advancements promise to exceed expectations and improve Digital workplace solutions evolved over the years to respond to the growing and continuously challenging demands of organizations.

Every year we witness stronger evolutions from the traditional corporate intranet portals to smartly-integrated collaboration and employee engagement platforms.

With technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain to name a few, the possibilities seem to be endless. Companies can begin to leverage state-of-the-art digital workplace software to better engage their employees.

Originally published on www.crrux.com