ISG Provider Lens™ Digital Workplace of the Future - Services & Solutions - Germany 2020 - Digital Workplace Consulting Services
The Digitalization Trend is Accelerated by COVID-19
In the second quarter 2020, remote working was extended to the limit in Germany: The number of people working from home has not gone up significantly in recent years, due to security concerns, union council objections and cultural issues. The outbreak and regulation relating to COVID-19 changed all that. Companies had to quickly implement working from home for thousands of employees. Judging by the cases reported back to ISG, most organizations were successful at managing the technology and infrastructure transformation. By and large, they dealt smoothly with issues related to sourcing enough devices, enabling bandwidth and providing collaboration tools.
The biggest concerns about the sudden home-office surge related to security and change management: Many organizations in the public and private sectors had to make shortcuts to bring employees quickly into the remote working environment. This rapid shift has caused security concerns, as identity and access technologies are not always optimized for the authentication requirements of workers accessing critical systems from home. An even bigger concern is the lost touch with the organization, especially with the elder work population. Change management programs and experience-level agreements (XLA) have become a new paradigm for provider differentiation.
Digital Workplace Consulting Services focus on the digital transformation post-COVID-19: Enabling employee productivity, safety and health at home are becoming critical capabilities. Providers who get this equation right stand a good chance of increasing trust with their clients and strengthening ties in the moments of crisis.
Managed Workplace Services are in transition to adapt to the post-COVID-19 environment: Many technologies based on office improvements have declined in importance. At the same time, solutions including scaling virtual meeting capacity, securing connections and delivering office furniture and mobile devices to homes are rising in importance. Help desk services are under pressure to deliver on a better employee experience from home, and many providers deploy analytics to deliver it.
Managed Mobility Services continue to rise in importance: Clients are increasingly looking for seamless collaboration across fixed and mobile platforms and expect mobile productivity to be enhanced with modern workflow applications integrated into corporate back-end systems including CRM and ERP. This is another area where clients are wary about security patches and seek robust propositions from providers.
Specialist Unified Endpoint Solutions are becoming a vital tool to enhance the end-user experience: Solution vendors are strongly focused on improving the user experience of the clients’ employees and the deployment of reliable security features to endpoints for threat and vulnerability management. Specialized providers play a major role and represent the majority of the leaders in the UEM quadrant.
The market for Unified Communications & Collaboration Solutions has seen growth climb in two consecutive quarters: Whereas scalability and network efficiency were the most urgent requirements with the home office surge, UCC is now very focused on the overall user experience and security aspects. The number of applications and devices supported is on the increase, and cloud-based solutions are becoming rapidly more prominent.
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