The digital workplace truly represents where the market is going. Enterprise collaboration is becoming a nonnegotiable requirement for business success, an article from CMSWire.com reports, and 2014 could be the year when many organizations truly make the move.
We define the digital workplace as 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. That can involve a wide variety of tools and approaches, as long as the focus is on encouraging user adoption and serving specific business needs.
Organizations that don’t create an effective digital workplace will not be able to reach the same level of productivity as those that embrace such an environment. They’ll suffer from a lack of collaboration and idea sharing inherent with not harnessing the full talent and capability of their workforce.
The key going forward will be to move toward a digital workplace model without disrupting the business. We’re seeing more tension with change management, and no organization wants to introduce disruption that’ll hinder productivity.
That’s why it’s important to bridge the gap as best you can, introducing the new digital workplace solutions in a manner that combines ways users are used to doing their work with new capabilities that allow for improved collaboration. This could mean providing users SharePoint document library access directly in the Outlook client, or using third-party add-ons like Harmon.ie.
It’s also important to incorporate remote workers into your digital workplace. Geographically dispersed workers need to feel connected to office-based employees, and more organizations are seeking to break down those geographic barriers. For mobile devices, determine your specific use cases such as document access, basic workflow and newsfeeds, and design your mobile strategy around these specific uses rather than trying to cram your intranet into a tablet or mobile phone.
When it comes to virtual collaboration and the digital workplace, our experts believe that we’re close to the tipping point where the cost and capabilities combine to make a compelling case for investment for even small to mid-sized firms that couldn’t afford these types of solutions in the past. We expect to see many organizations making the move and asking their users to change in 2014. The benefits of content management, document sharing and collaboration are becoming too powerful to ignore.
Source: CMSWire.com, December 2013
