These are the capabilities an individual employee relies on to get their job done and is focused on tool that would predominantly used if you are working alone.
Presence Management lets others know whether or not you’re available to chat or speak, and personal analytics is a new capability that gives you vital information about how much time you’re spending in meetings, who you’re working most closely with, and when you’re most busy.
Virtual Digital Assistants (chatbots) are in here too. These are a capability that proliferates far outside of the Digital Workplace, but surfacing them via tools like Teams is a great way to put them in people’s hands in an environment in which they spend a lot of their working life.
Communication is all about one-to-one or one-to-many sessions in real-time. It consists of IM (instant messaging), conferencing in all its forms (web, video, voice), and telephony in the enterprise. Email is the big one though, as it’s still the primary way most organisations communicate with one another. These are amongst the highest-volume use cases for every company in every sector, and while getting them right may not win any awards, getting them wrong can be absolutely catastrophic to productivity.
This is all about how teams or groups of individuals work together and collaborate, both within the organisation and with 3rd parties. Collaboration as a concept should consist of chat, document management, and task management, all of which are covered here. It’s also worth specifically calling out meetings, as the ability to book room resources, schedule meetings, and use hardware within meeting rooms (such as Teams Rooms devices or Surface Hubs) is crucial, and the in-meeting capabilities like virtual whiteboarding are important as well. Beyond that, it’s all about pushing the boundaries and differentiating, by empowering teams to become more productive by automating their business processes, and commoditising business intelligence/reporting services.
ECM is the set of capabilities that are on the more formal end of the spectrum, where it is less about collaboration amongst groups of employees, and more about managing, governing, and disseminating an organisation’s content. The intranet is the biggie here, and Enterprise Social is becoming increasingly prevalent as well (and you could make a good argument that it actually belongs under Group Productivity!).
Then you’ve got the old-school ‘management’-type capabilities, such as KM (knowledge management), DM (document management), ILM (information lifecycle management), RM (records management), and compliance-related things like eDiscovery and GDPR data subject request management.
Video content (be it live streaming or hosting videos) is becoming ever-more pervasive in the enterprise and should be addressed as part of the Digital Workplace, and a search capability to unify all of the content and enable people to retrieve and discover the information they need is absolutely crucial.
IdAM is all about ensuring the right people have the right level of access to the right technology resources. Moving towards modern identities in services like Azure Active Directory is a key tenet here, and you can drastically improve your organisation’s security posture through things like conditional access and multi-factor authentication. You also need to consider how you manage and grant access to different resources for employees, third parties, and privileged accounts. Another key capability to consider here is how you provide modern authentication and seamless single sign-on for on-premises applications, and how you grant partners and third parties rights to get onto these older platforms.
The security capabilities within the Digital Workplace are about how you keep control of your organisation’s information. The enterprise’s security perimeter has changed with the advent of cloud and the rise of the ability to work remotely from any location/device, and you now need to deal with many hundreds of smaller security bubbles floating around in the ether, rather than a hard perimeter around your own organisation. Information Rights Management gives you the ability to control how your information is treated even when shared with third parties, and DLP (Data Loss Prevention) helps lower the risk of users leaking valuable or sensitive information outside of the company. Digital Workplace is a key platform with high-use, a lot of data, and – in all likelihood – a lot of third parties accessing it, so things like threat management and security monitoring/alerting capabilities are important to bake in here too.
You cannot get the most out of the user-facing capabilities in the Digital Workplace (or indeed any other application or system) unless you have a good device. But you also need to control these devices to keep information secure, and in the mobile-first world, you need a way of controlling smartphones and tablets too. Managing these endpoints effectively and efficiently is therefore crucial.
The final piece of the puzzle is the set of capabilities around how you deploy and manage software and other configuration on your employees’ devices. This has implications on the security side of things, but also helps you to ensure everyone is kept on the latest/most appropriate versions of any client software that is needed as part of the Digital Workplace.
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