As a result of increasing mobility and following a year when everyone interacted with organizations remotely, Gartner identified ‘anywhere operations’ as a top strategic trend for 2021. It refers to a model that assumes that employees and customers could be anywhere. It’s going to mean a change in the way that products and services are delivered and the delivery of more collaboration tools to help employees become more productive.
To successfully deliver anywhere operations IT teams will have to focus on digital as the default delivery method for rolling out change, while enhancing physical spaces digitally, and they are going to have to support it with capabilities distributed more widely across physical and virtual domains.In a series of blogs, we are discussing the challenges and opportunities of delivering anywhere operations, and investigate the five areas Gartner suggests IT teams focus on.
- Automating endpoint operations
- Adapting infrastructure to new ways of working
- Optimizing cloud and edge infrastructure
- Enhancing end user productivity and collaboration
- Improving the Digital Experience
Here we look at the challenges and opportunities of improving the digital experience.
The 2021 Adobe State of Work survey found that digital workers are even more invested in their roles today. That’s no mean feat given the tumultuous times we have all been through. Technology had taken on a more prominent role over the last 18 months or so and it seems we all have less patience if it gets in the way of productivity, with 49% of survey respondents saying that they would quit a job if technology was hard to use or outdated.
As companies adapt to new hybrid and remote working models and combine physical office spaces to leverage cost efficiencies, IT teams should focus on the smooth delivery of services to remote workers, while enhancing physical spaces digitally for a better end user experience.
Assume the default delivery is digital and that all employees and customers are interacting with the company remotely. There are many ways to do this. Companies could implement VR and AR capabilities to allow end users to get a better feel of products. Or you may want to implement new ways for customers to interact and get answers to issues or to experience products.
If you’re rolling out changes to remote workers, you’ll need to introduce a few additional steps over and above those you would do when employees are office based. For example, you’ll want to understand the constraints of all your end users’ broadband service, and when end users are going to be online and available for scheduling. You’ll also need to monitor the status of any updates to ensure everything goes smoothly and there are no interruptions that mean you need to start again.
Enhance physical spaces digitally
There are many ways to enhance the experience for employees and customers within physical spaces. Here are a few options:
- Make workplace hoteling smarter by tailoring office areas and workstations to the needs of the users and teams that will use that space.
- Offer pre-booking options for employees or allow them to scan QR codes on workstations using their device to understand if it’s available for them to use when they drop in.
- Implement VR and AR capabilities in training areas or labs to augment the experience for global teams that are training or working in different locations.
- Enable facial recognition so that customers can use their features for contactless payments and don’t have to wait in queues.
- Allow customers to scan products in stores for more information, such as FAQs or other customer reviews.
As you deliver new capabilities you are going to be adding more devices, applications, and other components into the mix. Growing IT complexity is already holding teams back from delivering on existing digitalization programs. We’ve discussed the reasons for this in previous articles but it’s primarily because of the disparate mix of tools used to manage the environment and the many outdated manual processes being used to make up for the lack of tool interoperability.
So how can you overcome these challenges and deliver changes that meet the dynamic needs of your enterprise end users to support anywhere operations? The answer could be in adopting a digital platform conductor (DPC). A DPC reduces the complexity and risks of implementing change and managing IT assets – both physical and virtual – across your distributed IT environment, to allow you to become more agile to constantly improve the digital experience for customers and employees.
A DPC allows you to break down the siloes created by your existing disparate tools by connecting to and orchestrating them. Using a digital platform conductor, you’ll be able to leverage automation to conduct tasks such as data aggregation, normalization, and analysis, as well as communicating with end users and teams so that you are always aware of their needs. This will allow you to make better decisions on the capabilities you should deliver to cater to those needs, as well as how to roll them out without disrupting the organization.
Book a demo to understand how ReadyWorks, a digital platform conductor tool, can help you optimize cloud and edge infrastructure for anywhere operations.
