The digital workplace brings together a range of new integrated solutions — including social, mobile and collaboration — in a way that helps companies dramatically improve their productivity, efficiency, innovation and collaboration.
Curious about what life at your firm could look like by embracing the digital workplace?
Imagine a scenario in which your employees are collaborating to create proposals and other documents. In a well-designed and implemented digital workplace, they would be able to make edits and suggest changes without the hassle of sending multiple versions through email. Your clients’ sensitive information would be available instantly to key individuals who have been granted access, while kept secure from prying eyes.
Imagine that your employees are able to communicate efficiently no matter where they are in the world, staying productive with mobile devices even when they’re on the road. Imagine that they’re also able to quickly find experts in other departments or offices, maximizing the value of your organization’s institutional knowledge.
The Digital Workplace, Defined
The term “digital workplace” refers to an environment where employees are able to quickly and easily share what they know and find what they need with consistent experiences across devices and locations.
If you think only in terms of the technologies that make up the digital workplace, they tend to fall under these categories:
- Collaboration – Connecting people
- Business intelligence – Gaining insight
- Instant messaging (IM) and video conferencing – Communicating in real time
- Content management – Connecting with content
- Search – Finding people and content
- Mobile – Access wherever you are
- Workflows and forms – Automating processes
Bringing these tools together in a unified user experience takes additional strategic and design elements, such as:
- Information design – Organizing and tagging content so it can be easily found
- User experience (UX) design – Designing sites to improve usability
- Information governance – Implementing policies regarding who has access to what and who can take certain actions
The key to success with the digital workplace is to think of these systems and concepts in a more comprehensive way, as an environment that aligns tools and strategies to meet user needs and business objectives.
Professional services firms have found the digital workplace particularly transformative by breaking down barriers to communication and knowledge sharing – helping organizations be more agile and responsive to change.
Unlike a manufacturing company, for example, firms in law, accounting, engineering and other specialties are typically made up of knowledge workers, the majority of whom are highly compensated and engaged in non-repetitive tasks that require constant access to internal sources of knowledge and best practices. Given this, any incremental increases in productivity and effectiveness have a multiplier effect on profitability, while more time for innovation drives differentiation and growth.
In a factory, IT solutions are used to streamline routine tasks that are performed the same way thousands of times. But the nature of knowledge work and professional services is that much of the work is not routinized, which often makes it difficult to improve productivity by simply applying technology.
Fortunately, with the advent of the digital workplace, we now have tools designed to drive productivity while supporting the highly collaborative and creative processes of today’s knowledge workers. This newfound ease of collaboration, communication and content management offers significant advantages for you and your professional services firm.
Learn more about the benefits of today’s digital workplace capabilities by downloading our free e-book, Your Roadmap To The Digital Workplace: A Step-By-Step Guide For Professional Services Firms.
