It’s no secret that technology is rapidly changing the way we work. According to IBM, both your employees and customers have high expectations for personalized user experiences. To keep up with new demands for enterprise mobility and other subsets of managed workplace services, companies need to be agile and shift their business models and workforce to take advantage of new opportunities, always implementing continuous improvement.
Managed Services in the Digital Age
Current workplace and infrastructures look different and function in their own way. Through communication and collaboration, specific digital trends have started cropping up in workspaces that directly affects support services like managed and application services. According to Forbes, your workplace strategy should include the following service offerings:
1. The Cloud
While you may merely consider the cloud a tool through which you move data and files, today, it’s so much more. According to Gartner, new digital managed workplace services provide cloud-first, automated and integrated support to end users. Services offered by the cloud can be categorized as infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. The cloud continues to be an attractive option for companies due to its numerous, customizable options. Additionally, hybrid cloud environments prove to be cost effective and save time and space. Among all trends listed here, the cloud is likely the most transformative.
2. Virtualized Desktop Environments
Thanks to virtual desktop infrastructure, employees can see their work desktop from almost anywhere, which allows them to work at any time from any place. This changes security needs for organizations as employees need their tablets and mobile phones to be made as secure as their work computers. As employees continue to go mobile, expect to potentially see the eventual disappearance of the physical office.
3. Removed Bureaucracy
Action-oriented work processes and models give employees more responsibility rather than creating more detailed and ineffective processes. This will occur when mundane and extremely tedious work is simplified with technology like workflow management, platforms, and apps, among others.
4. The Future of the Service Desk
According to CIO, expect automation like AI and chatbots to enhance Service Desk offerings in the near future, while also reshaping the roles their human counterparts provide. Further, companies are recognizing the importance of delivering and supporting a superior customer experience, thereby driving resources toward the creation and protection of experience-based customer value. To support both internal and external customers, automation is likely to reshape the manner in which support organizations operate.
Upcoming Workplace Changes
According to JLL, to get a better picture of what the future of workplace and infrastructure looks like, check out these four areas forward-thinking companies are focusing on the enact change:
1. Technology and real estate to accelerate innovation
Future-thinking companies are striving to be disruptors. To keep up with this era of change, smart companies will be creating new business models, products and services that take advantage of a growing digital ecosystem of data, connectivity, and devices. Technologies such as augmented reality and IoT will allow companies to reinvent their business models and unlock new sources of growth. It is highly important to comprehend how real estate and the workplace can help future-proof your business. Presently, it is possible for many employees to work remotely, so the office space must be reimagined. Soon, offices will be looked at as places of co-creation – areas where partners, outside experts, and employees meet to develop new ideas, services, projects. As idea incubator spaces, these transformed workplace will become a vital part of workplace and innovation strategy.
2. The workplace will be reinvented by smart business systems and data, which will keep employees productive and happy
Expect advanced analytics in the future to start gathering data from smartphones, sensors, and wearables to measure and monitor interactions and work inside. After buildings learn your preferences, they will respond automatically to adjust the workplace environment to your preferences as soon as you enter. This data can be used to suggest design interventions that will increase business performance. New ways will be used to optimize space as the use of space and types of interactions therein will be monitored and correlated with strategic business metrics such as staff turnover. Further, design will be driven by data, which will connect business strategic aims to daily operations. Additionally, workplaces will be redesigned more often and become more interchangeable. Renting, rather than buying, furniture will become much more common, so refits and redeployments can happen more often.
3. To attract and retain talent, improve workplace experiences
Executives realize that giving people a job and an office in which to work is not enough – the workplace needs to be a place employees want to be and where they feel productive. And one of the most important factors of the workplace involves who will be using it; namely, digital dependents who grow up playing with iPads and mobile devices. Predictive technologies will reportedly become much more common as well. Agility will come into play too, with the workplace needing to become highly flexible, mobile, commanding work-life balance and promoting wellness. Activity-based working will be used to boost employees’ productivity and meet the next generation’s needs, which will include shared access spaces for individual and collaborative work. Further, high-quality services like employee lounges and fitness centers will become typical features at core locations.
4. Internet connectivity as a key driver of location choices for businesses
As mobile employees continue to increase in the workforce, internet speed and connectivity is a major productivity driver. Cloud computing and device adoption have already impacted the workforce, with JLL predicting that by 2025, at least 80 percent of the world’s adults will own smartphones. Corporations will be attracted to buildings hosting connection speeds that allow for 5G speed networks and hefty cloud computing services that accommodate software, data storage and digital infrastructure. Further, companies will look for locations that are close to communications infrastructures and have a resistance to outages. As network connectivity becomes increasingly embedded within buildings’ structures, competitive advantage will depend on the cabling system’s speed distance, public cloud and design.
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