Ask The Expert: A Vision for the Next-Generation Workplace

The way we work, and the workplaces where we conduct business, have changed drastically over the last generation. Twenty years ago, e-mail was just starting to revolutionize how we communicate. Today, advances in the speed and availability of networks, mobility options, and other factors are once again changing how we think of and utilize the workplace.

Gavin Williams, Avanade Europe Director of Infrastructure and Security Solutions, examines some of today's trends and their effect on the workplace, and describes the vision that Avanade and Accenture share for a Next-Generation Workplace that capitalizes on these trends and new technologies to increase employee productivity.

What's different about today's workplace?

What do these trends mean for business productivity and processes today?

What do you recommend for businesses considering ways to enhance productivity and collaboration in their workplaces?

What is Avanade's view of what the workplace can look like?

How has Avanade begun to implement the Next-Generation Workplace?

Q: What's different about today's workplace?

Over the past five years, we've seen and heard from our customers about a few trends taking shape in the modern workplace. First is that increasingly, workforces are becoming virtual and mobile. For Avanade, due to the consulting nature of our business, this has been a reality since our inception--our workforce must be able to stay connected to the workplace and each other regardless of physical location. And for all industries, the increasing availability of broadband networks has made it possible for employees to take work outside of the office walls into their home, customer offices, airports, and other locations.

Second, this increase in network connectivity has meant that multinational organizations can connect their global workforces on a single network, enabling opportunities for greater degrees of collaboration across teams spread geographically and across different time zones. Increasingly, teams are able to ‘virtually' connect and work around the clock, regardless of differences in physical location.

Third, with the increasing collaboration across teams and virtual teams comes a demand for timely access to information. With computing hardware prices on the decline, the capacity to store information is on the rise. Employees can easily create and save documents retaining important information—moving business faster and also fulfilling a truism that data will expand to fill the storage available. The easy way in which we can produce and store information can create an overload of information, making it challenging for employees to find, understand, or take full advantage of the information available.

Fourth, as employees gain more freedom about when and where they work, organizations are challenged with the control and governance of workplace assets, which are becoming highly distributed. When theses assets can be in the forms of laptops, desktops or other devices spread around the world, finding cost-effective ways to understand, manage and monitor these assets becomes challenging for organizations.

Lastly, we have seen that technologies from the consumer market are entering into corporate environments, with organizations including multiple consumer devices and technologies into the standard corporate ‘desktops'. These devices were not always owned by companies, for example, as when employees use their own systems to work from home, yet they are used to access corporate networks and resources.

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Q: What do these trends mean for business productivity and processes today?

Businesses today have the opportunity to significantly increase the productivity of their employees by modernizing their workplaces to take advantage of mobility and virtualization trends. Employees no longer need be tied to a 9 to 5 schedule at a physical office, but can connect to the corporate network—whether they are at home or traveling—to maximize collaboration across teams and time zones.

Especially in today's "do more with less" business landscape, these workplace trends reveal ways that IT can be employed to improve business productivity and bring strategic value to organizations. By enabling a collaborative work environment, IT is also providing value in raising the productivity of employees, and also in increasing retention by giving employees the tools they need to do their job.

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Q: What do you recommend for businesses considering ways to enhance productivity and collaboration in their workplaces?

First, organizations should assess the readiness of their IT infrastructure and employees to see where they are today in terms of levels of technology, and then examine their appetite for change. That is, how much change can they absorb? One thing I have found when working with our customers in Europe is that organizations have clear ideas about the amount of change their end users can absorb.

If an organization does not absorb change very quickly, then attempting to implement comprehensive changes may bring challenges. If end users are not culturally or technically ready for sweeping changes, then the business return will under perform and a better approach would be to plan for a phased rollout of the workplace solution giving end users more time to adopt the new technology.

After an assessment of end user readiness the organization needs to envision what the new workplace will look like and plan the development and rollout. At the same time, the organization will want to look at the maturity of their infrastructure and make needed investments for cost and management savings and to make new technologies easier to deploy. When working with our customers to conduct Infrastructure Assessments we have seen how enhancing the maturity of the environment creates a platform for growth for the business and workplace productivity.

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Q: What is Avanade's view of what the workplace can look like?

Avanade is working with Accenture and Microsoft to usher in the benefits of what Accenture has termed the Next Generation Workplace. Accenture has created a vision of The Next Generation Workplace which will help organizations strategically realign workplace technology and applications and services with changing business and workforce needs to drive increased productivity and efficiency benefits. This new workplace is designed to provide a seamless working environment that is accessible from any device, anywhere, anytime. Avanade's technical expertise helps bring this vision to life of the Microsoft platform.

Through the Next Generation Workplace, Accenture and Avanade can help organizations strategically realign workplace technology and collaboration applications and services with changing business and workforce needs. This new environment enables higher productivity through new ways of working, as well as improved management and use of information, enabling employees to make faster, more informed decisions.

The Next Generation Workplace is a comprehensive and prescriptive vision that shows what is possible today together with the transformation, acceleration, and planning and management tools to help you get there better, faster. Acting to bring this vision to life can yield benefits to the end user with increased collaboration and productivity and also to the IT group supporting the workplace, by reducing the time and effort required to maintain the applications and systems that drive the work environment.

As a comprehensive vision, within Accenture's Next-Generation Workplace are scenarios that give organizations a roadmap for action today and moving into the future. Today, these scenarios show you how you can transform your environment to address a variety of business and IT needs, including;

• Collaboration
• Content Management
• Enterprise Search
• Virtualization
• Software as a service
• Unified Communications
• Dynamic Management & Provisioning
• Line-of-business application integration

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Q: How has Avanade begun to implement the Next-Generation Workplace?

As a mobile, worldwide consulting company, Avanade was able to partner with both Microsoft and Accenture to develop a real-time collaborative environment. With this vision of the workplace, Avanade began its own effort to enable greater collaboration and productivity from its workforce. To enable instant communication and virtual workspaces for collaboration on single documents Avanade became an early adopter of several new Microsoft technologies. For example, we embraced and adopted Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 to develop a collaborative environment with information on Avanade solutions. This site is available to all employees and allows anyone to receive real-time alerts from the solution repository anytime a new paper, piece of collateral or architectural diagram is created, giving our worldwide network of consultants access to the latest IP and information to enhance our work with customers.

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