The digital revolution has transformed our daily lives, optimising ways of working, enhancing productivity and culminating in the evolution of traditional offices into highly flexible Digital Workplaces. This evolution has unlocked the potential of a truly robust co-creation, in which people and technology come together in physical spaces to work more efficiently, enhance employee engagement, develop customer-led solutions and services, and greatly improve go-to-market times.

Empowering employees and providing greater levels of autonomy help not only to stimulate creativity, but ensure significant increases in productivity. Workplaces with the versatility and flexibility to support various working styles, where digital intelligence is harnessed to improve experiences and enable mobility, whilst still ensuring the security of the organisation, employees, and data, are now crucial to the success of the modern business. Although there are numerous ways of working in the contemporary marketplace, experience has shown that agile values in combination with lean start-up principles are optimal in improving go-to-market rates and developing solutions that customers prefer.

The paradigms of success in business have shifted, with the focus now on sharing and collaborating. Businesses need to ensure that information is easier to access, relationships are formed with greater simplicity, and success is more obtainable than ever. Digital Workplaces are designed with humans as the priority, but the role and importance of technology cannot be underestimated. Leveraging the best technological solutions allows for the streamlining of businesses, reducing downtimes, lowering maintenance costs, and ensuring greater longevity of equipment.

The Digital Workplace is also more responsive to customer needs, enhancing the efficiency of marketing and sales, and providing tangible outcomes by enabling faster ideation through wireframes, designs, and prototypes of end-to-end solutions. Furthermore, it enables first-to-market solutions and shortened product cycles.

It might sound too good to be true, and one may ask how exactly this highly desirable Digital Workplace can be implemented?

The key to the Digital Workplace lies in the tight integration of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud capabilities into every aspect of an organisation’s commercial processes. Certain technologies are already being used to great effect in this regard: mobile devices, unified communications, video and audio conferencing, interactive screens, and software suites like Office 365 and Google’s G Suite, to name a few. Additionally, leveraging digital tools such as the Internet of Things (IoT) assist scale in agility, scope, and speed to meet one’s needs.

Managing organisations in the same way as the previous “age of information scarcity” is simply not feasible in the contemporary marketplace. People, whether at work or at home, together or co-located, must use their time effectively to revitalise productivity. In the age of information abundance, we must adopt Digital Workplaces to ensure organisational survival and prosperity, whilst empowering and engaging employees to unlock their potential, boost employee retention, and attract future employees.