Published October 10, 2011 by Stephan Schillerwein

This is the final part of a mini-series giving a preview on our whitepaper about the Digital Workplace. The whitepaper which covers all the topics in detail is available for download from Friday (Oct. 14^th) and you can pre-register for it using the link that you will find at the bottom of this post.

The previous posts looked at the vastly changed nature of work in organizations today and the massive problems this has brought along with it. It is now time to look at the instrument to change this situation a bit more in detail.
As already mentioned earlier, the Digital Workplace is not primarily an IT-system. While technology ultimately is the indispensable enabler a Digital Workplace is made up of, it can only be effective when completely embedded into all aspects of an organization. This of course is only possible if fully backed by management and accompanied by substantial change management activities. Both work and management practices need to adapt for the better in order for the Digital Workplace to live up to its full promise. Furthermore, a “logical infrastructure” (e.g. enterprise-wide information architectures) has to be in place just as much as the technical one.
 

Supporting all aspects of information work

Today’s situation in information work can be compared to an ill organized workshop where tools lie about all over the place and workers constantly have to look how and with which tool to best do their next task. What we should be having instead is a highly automated assembly line with everything in place and manual activity focussed on what human intervention is required for.
In order to deliver on that promise, the Digital Workplace has to support information work from end-to-end instead of just being a repository that can be accessed when needed. Given the broad spectrum that information work has in organizations, also the scope of the Digital Workplace needs to be comprehensively covering that spectrum.
This “holistic” approach can make it hard to grasp what the Digital Workplace actually is.
In order to make sense of the multitude of disciplines and functionalities involved in the Digital Workplace, it should be seen as a framework that is made up of different building blocks. Organizations can make us of these in accordance to their respective needs. There are three types of building blocks:

• Work Performance Building Blocks: there are 4 building blocks in this area, covering all aspects directly related to performance in information work. They include personal performance, team performance, organizational performance and process performance.
  Personal performance for instance is about having a central place where all the information and functions relevant to a person come together. This includes having a single repository for all personal and team or project tasks combined, seeing at a glance what is currently happening in all the projects and activities you are associated with, having overview panels for all metrics relevant to you (from target achievement to expenses reimbursement status) or direct access to information from any sources important to you whether in- or external. It also provides resources to draw upon in regard to continuous learning, organizing information relevant to you, getting paper-based information in and out of the Digital Workplace and many more utilities that enable a true one-stop-shop experience for everything a person needs to get their job done.
• Generic Building Blocks: this includes 2 areas only indirectly related to performance and tasks, namely “Communication & Information” and “Culture & Relations”. Both are aimed at providing resources for all things not directly embedded in an employee’s work tasks, like for instance everything relating to corporate culture.
  In the Digital Workplace this will become even more important, as the tools we do our work with are an integral part of our day-to-day experience of the company we work for. Naturally, a professional, well-designed, ergonomic tool will allow for a more positive experience than one which is unpleasant to look at, cumbersome to use and frequently frustrates you as it doesn’t support you in your tasks as it should do.
• Foundational Building Block: this provides the structures, context and services that build the foundation of the Digital Workplace and that are offered to and used in the other building blocks. This is the “engine” below the components described above. Unlike in current systems (where for instance the intranet has its own distinct search engine) it provides its services to all the components. This is a key distinction in order to make services available truly cross-system. Without them, a unified user experience and “single-point-of-working” is not possible.

 
The report contains detailed descriptions and sample scenarios for all building blocks.
 

A place for all your information, messages and notifications

While the Digital Workplace consists of many parts and pieces, some such elements that are key to the success of the Digital Workplace are outlined in a separate chapter of the whitepaper. One such key element is the Universal Inbox.
There is a strong motivation behind this, as it is not sheer information volumes alone that impact employee productivity and frustration most, but diversity of channels, information types, systems and media. In that environment, today’s number one information management tool, the e-mail inbox constitutes but one of many channels that employees constantly (have to) check for messages, news and notifications of all sorts. And with each new system an additional place to check is introduced, further impacting productivity and stress through constant system change.
Rather than further adding to the already high levels of information sprawl, the Digital Workplace needs to do away with that burden by bringing together all messages, news streams, alerts and notifications an employee receives across all systems, channels and devices in a single place.
This place can be thought of as a personal, fully customized “Universal Inbox”. It is likely to be one of the most important factors for employee acceptance of any Digital Workplace as its benefits are clearly obvious upon first use. All information relevant to a person is aggregated in a single place with rich capabilities for filtering and acting on the respective messages and notifications.
Until now the role of the universal inbox has been delegated to the email software for lack of alternatives. Many systems for instance send emails to users to notify them about news and changes that occur in that system (e.g. a workflow system sending a notification about a new task a person has been assigned with). Lack of integration, interactivity and control make this concept no longer an option in the Digital Workplace.
 

The next step

I hope this series of teasers to the whitepaper “The Digital Workplace – Redefining Productivity in the Information Age” has sparked your interest in the topic.
From Friday, October 14^th, you can download the full whitepaper free of charge from the website of Infocentric Research or order a paper copy there. Pre-registration is already open.
Link: The Digital Workplace – Redefining Productivity in the Information Age