ISG Provider Lens™ Digital Workplace of the Future - Archetype Report 2020 - Pandemic Highlights The Most Important Workplace Need For Enterprises

Pandemic Highlights The Most Important Workplace Need For Enterprises

For the last several months, the world has been battling the coronavirus outbreak and the upheaval it has brought to the workplace and the way work is done. Millions of employees have moved to remote working environment or a home setup. The global pandemic has accelerated the shift to many digital technologies, which would otherwise have taken years to implement. Workplace technologies are no exception, and the world has been witnessing a rapid implementation of technologies that would facilitate a smooth transition from the office space to home, enabling remote productivity, remote support and remote collaboration. Clients globally also wanted to ensure that employees are not only working at the same or a high level of productivity but are also honing their skills. While most large enterprises have embraced the remote office setup, there are many from diverse industries that require their workforce to be at the office for various reasons. This calls for securing the current workplace from an employee well-being perspective.

As workplace management or enterprise IT organizations have been heavily occupied in these times and are continuing to churn out ideas on innovation to keep the lights on, there is little immediate impact on workplace outsourcing contracts. A big change, however, is the inclusion of greater elements of technologies such as desktop virtualization and meeting/conferencing solution support to enable remote working. With prevailing turbulence bringing in the “new normal” way of working, enterprise buying behavior with respect to workplace technologies and services are showing steady changes. While the key focus areas remain the same, the pandemic has highlighted the most important needs for workplace transformation that would differ for each client. Some of the key areas that client organizations are currently focusing on while sourcing workplace services are described below.

The focus on automation-led workplace support continues, but the shift is now accelerating with more clients rapidly implementing automated chatbots or artificial intelligence-enabled solutions to support workplace support agents. Earlier, there was a difference in the level of maturity that clients have with these technologies. While some clients have just started adopting these technologies, there are others that have made significant progress. With the significant impact of the pandemic across industries, all organizations are trying to come to the same level. For example, while a chatbot-enabled service desk support was a desired feature, and many organizations were still figuring out the best way to start on this technology, this has become an essential feature as many users work from home. Also, with the nationwide lockdowns and social distancing norms, it is often not possible to get in touch with a support agent in person. While these capabilities have great potential for enhancing end-user experience, they are often seen only as an enabler of greater cost savings and improved efficiency for support agents. All these outcomes translate into a higher user experience. However, for many clients, the focus is not really on user experience but on sustaining themselves with higher efficiency at minimum costs. A key point is that clients are also looking for hard, real and quantifiable evidence of such improvements in costs and operational efficiency.

While some clients are beginning to understand the concept of measurable user experience, many are focused on building their workplace environment, remote or physical, to enhance the employee experience. These clients understand that it is the employees that define a workplace and not the technologies and their experience, whether the technologies work or not. There is a strong interest in delivering workplace experience beyond the traditional areas of IT service desk or workplace support. This can extend to business functions by integrated enterprise business applications. There is also a growing focus on enabling technology change or adoption culture to provide measurable business benefits.

Employee experience with workplace revolves around many aspects, not all related to technologies; however, technology is a key area. In the pandemic situation, clients can leverage the latest technologies to gauge the changing user experience as they work remotely. For example, an interactive cognitive virtual agent can help users to access apps and data from a newly shipped company device or in a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model as they work from home. Helping users enable the technology on their own elevates their experience and enhances productivity. Similarly, the ability to access payroll, leave applications and bills approval through any device anytime or within a single workflow system reduces time and helps enhance not just user experience but also business process efficiency.

Managed workplace service providers are increasingly signing new contracts and renewing existing contracts with a focus on measurable user experience. These new experience level agreements (XLAs) can measure traditional technology focused KPIs or go deeper to business-level KPIs. The depth of the experience-level (XLs) KPIs depends on enterprise IT integration with business units.

The pandemic has also put office productivity suites at the forefront of workplace technologies. There was already a big shift toward the Microsoft technology ecosystem, which ISG highlighted in last year’s digital workplace archetype report. It was creating a vendor lock-in situation with Microsoft, offering an entire spectrum of solutions ranging from the operating system, device management, productivity solutions and virtual desktops. However, with pandemic striking large clients, they could only continue with solutions that can easily integrate with existing technology ecosystems. Hence, we see a rush to implement and adopt Microsoft solutions, particularly Office 365 and Teams. This does not mean that solutions from other vendors are not being adopted, and ISG has seen a surge in demand for solutions such as Zoom, Cisco Webex and BlueJeans. Clients dependent on Google’s G-Suite are also accelerating their adoption. Clients are increasingly interested in measuring value being generated with the usage of such solutions and in running analytics for user behavior and performance or for gauging their increasing digital dexterity and adroitness.

While there is a strong focus on enabling remote working, many organizations from select industries are already preparing to bring their employees back to the office. This raises a new set of challenges for the workplace and facilities management to keep check on the spread of the disease and provide a secured environment for employees. Technology comes into play here with diverse solutions available for monitoring employee health and providing alerts on violation of social distancing norms.

Some clients from certain process-heavy industries require their employees to be physically present at the office, factories, refineries, rigs, etc. These clients can leverage technologies such as augmented and virtual realities (AR/VR) and the internet-of-things (IoT) to enable front-line workers and get them to work smartly.

To summarize, the pandemic is raising numerous challenges and opportunities for enterprise organizations. ISG has observed these trends and has identified four broad buckets to categorize different buying behaviors. These archetypes are described in detail in the following sections. They also existed before the pandemic and will continue to persist for some time as most enterprise organizations have overcome the initial shock of the crisis and are now strategizing for the foreseeable future. The four archetypes are explained in the following graph and highlights the challenges and changes induced by COVID-19.

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