Before we talk about the modern workplace, here are a couple of relevant statistics you might find of interest:
- According to the Financial Times; UK productivity levels are 15% lower than the average for the World’s leading economies
- Meanwhile, according to Gartner, Employee Engagement is one of the strongest key indicators for organisational measures such as customer ratings, profitability, performance and turnover
“What has this got to do with IT?” you might ask. Simple – an organisation’s IT function is, today more than ever, becoming a key indicator of innovation in comparison to its competitors. Or, to put it another way: your investment in IT can improve employee engagement; leading to increased productivity and, more importantly, customer satisfaction.
Sounds simple, but…
Traditionally, IT systems have evolved to be organisation-centric (or at best application centric). In this model, the user was seen as someone to ‘deploy’ IT to, rather than as an IT service ‘consumer’. Invariably, this forces users to adapt their work styles to suit the IT systems, compromising productivity and engagement.
Worse still, today’s IT-savvy workforce are increasingly implementing their own solutions to improve collaboration, productivity, flexibility and engagement. This is often referred to as ‘Shadow IT’, or the ‘Dropbox Problem’.
Users aside, today’s IT systems have also evolved from disparate and disjointed components. This has resulted in a mishmash of technologies deployed in the data centre, the desktop and increasingly in the Cloud.
Other than the, already discussed, impact on productivity and engagement; today’s IT systems, and users’ attempts to thwart them, introduce a number of other specific organisational challenges:
- The considerable risk of compliance breaches as unauthorised technologies are used to share and store commercially sensitive and personal data
- The difficulty of attracting new employees as they turn to organisations with more evolved IT systems
- Ultimately, the delays in delivering service to customers, regardless of sector: health, professional services, construction, government
Our Productivity & Engagement solutions deliver Microsoft’s Modern Workplace vision in a way that reflects your business needs by combining productivity (Office 365), collaboration (Teams, SharePoint), EUC (Windows Virtual Desktop & RDS) and communications (Business Voice).
To bring it all together we provide first class consultancy services to ensure that your solution is designed specifically to meet your business needs, and continues to evolve as your needs change over the years.
And to keep it all running smoothly we provide our String 365 Managed Services that allow your organisation to focus on what it does best; while we take care of the IT stuff.