“The entire discussion and objective around Digital Workplace is moving towards Employee-Centric Workplace, which enables employee productivity from all corners and enhances user experience,” says Kalyan Kumar, executive vice president & CTO – ITO & Digital, HCL Technologies. In conversation with Ankush Kumar.
Edited excerpts from the interview.
How do you see the adoption of Digital Workspace Management?
Enterprises have realized that biggest contributors to a digital business strategy are their own employees, hence we are seeing a huge surge in demand from enterprises, across verticals, on constructing a workplace that makes use of technology to be highly unstructured yet highly collaborative & effective.
There are many factors that are contributing to this trend, some of these include – employee expectations, advancement in technology, reduction in cost of technology etc. We expect Digital workplace adoption to accelerate going forward across enterprises.
What are the latest trends in this sector?
Consumerization and mobility are two key drivers that have completely changed the expectations on simplicity and experience that enterprise IT should deliver, for e.g. Dropbox has set a benchmark on how data should always follow the users.
Another emerging trend is, HR has emerged as an equal important stakeholder in digital workspace design, to give you an example, a large automobile manufacturer based out of US reached out to us to completely redesign their workplace strategy when they were planning to move their offices from mid-west to bay area. The reason was the business was planning to compete with the likes of Tesla for which they needed to hire the Gen Y coders and geeks, and you just cannot hire and retain them by giving them a locked-down, completely controlled workspace.
The entire discussion and objective around Digital Workplace is moving towards Employee-Centric Workplace, which enables employee productivity from all corners and enhances user experience.
What could be the core benefits that can be derived by the enterprises?
A digital workplace allows businesses to create and enable a workforce that is globally distributed, cross cultural and always connected. It also helps them attract and retain the Gen Y workforce that has evolved from being Technology Savvy to Technology Dependent. Another important benefit is improvement in employee productivity through unified experience and integrated systems.
Besides above, most important of all digital workplace at its core is really an intuitive workplace that is personalized to understand each user’s role and solves challenges endemic to his/her business profile.
What are the key verticals from where the actual demand is coming?
There is a steady surge in demand across verticals. Even, the traditionally controlled and regulated verticals such as pharma, BFSI are engaged with us on incorporating technology that would deliver a digital workplace experience.
Different verticals at times, may have different approaches or preferences on digital journey and may be faced with different challenges, however the final objective is more or less the same to have a Digital Workplace Management enabled within the enterprise for broad benefits associated with Digital Workplace adoption.
Do you see any challenges for the SMBs in moving towards Digital Workspace adoption?
SMBs are actually better positioned to adopt and lead the digital transformation. They typically do not come with the inherent investment and infrastructure baggage that a Fortune 500 enterprise would have, the decision making process is quicker allowing them to be early adopters of digital workspace blueprint.
The agility and speed on Digital Workplace transformation within SMBs ensures, that they realize the benefits sooner than other large organizations.
How important is the relevance of security when it comes to establishing Digital Workspace?
Security is crucial and paramount while embarking on Digital Workspace initiative. It’s implicit in each element of digital. As an example mobility comes with certain controls that IT can exercise, for example wiping off e-mails if the employee leaves the organization.
Key point here is that, security is no longer a barrier, rather, it’s an enabler that gives organizations confidence that a digital enterprise is no way a less secure enterprise. In fact, it allows IT to move away from a device centered security model to a user centered security model.
With new enhancements in security technologies on Digital Workspace side, this has enabled both employees and organizations to adopt Digital Workplace with more confidence.
How are technologies like Mobility, Cloud, IoT being used within this space?
Mobility has the ability to make employees more productive and deliver a radical experience when compared with traditional devices, these are especially beneficially for sales users and people who work outside of traditional office locations.
Cloud enabled by solutions like Microsoft office 365 and Google apps for work has given businesses agility to on-board users and quickly ramp up or ramp down offices in geographies that they want to expand.
IoT is even more interesting, as an example there are wearable available that would tomorrow allow users to carry their corporate identity in a wrist band negating the need for user name, password and even company issued ID cards. This is a space on which we are keeping a very close watch.
Besides above, there are other technology aspects like Service Orchestration, Analytics etc. that are shaping and impacting the Digital workplace space big time. All this combined is enabling fasting adoption of Digital Workplace within enterprises.