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Gartner Workplace Vision: Digital Dexterity

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Portals, content management systems, enterprise social networks, cloud file sharing, voice-driven mobile apps – these have all been steps along the way to the creation of a new digital workplace. In the vision presented at this week’s Gartner Digital Workplace Summit in Orlando, the point is to achieve “digital dexterity,” an agile enterprise in which people are empowered to deal effectively with “dynamic, non-routine work.”

Yet those who focus on the incremental delivery of technologies risk never quite getting where they want to go. “That’s like looking at the next step instead of the mountain you want to climb,” said Jeffrey Mann, one of the many analysts addressing the big picture vision and the path toward it. This is the latest edition of a Gartner event that once focused more narrowly on portals and content management. As Gartner analyst Chris Howard noted in the opening keynote, the digital content people will collaborate on going forward “will sometimes be a document but increasingly not,” a shift that is sometimes difficult for vendors whose heritage is document and content management to recognize.

One of the explicit goals of digital workplace strategy must be to create “a consumer-like computing experience,” recognizing how consumer technologies have taken the lead in delivering better user experiences, Howard said.

Catch phrase: “Consumer grade is the new industrial strength.”

To really take advantage of what’s possible, organizations must think in terms of business design as well as technology architecture, Howard said. By moving away from command-and-control hierarchy and allowing employees more autonomy, businesses make room for “discretionary contributions to business effectiveness.” In other words, they encourage employees to be enthusiastic about the success of the business by allowing them to contribute to that success.

Susan Landry, who shared the keynote stage with Howard, said voice-driven mobile apps like Apple’s Siri and Google Now particularly hint at where things are going. It’s not so much voice recognition and response that make these apps impressive – and, in fact, in their first iterations their limitations became apparent once the novelty wore off. Yet over the past couple of years, the ability of the software to understand and anticipate our needs has steadily improved.

The emergence of apps that “listen, interpret, and learn” are what’s going to make the biggest difference going forward, Landry said. At one point, the WYSWIG (what you see is what you get) style of user interface was cutting edge because it meant you could format a word processing or desktop publishing document visually rather than by entering codes into the computer. The next step will be more like WYNIWYG – what you need is what you get – and soon WHYNIWYGWYNI (the acronym Gartner is ridiculously proud of) for what you need is what you get when you need it.

The scenario Gartner dramatized with a video about a factory manager troubleshooting a production issue with the help of a talking app and a drone was futuristic – but only slightly.

Still, organizations working towards a grand future vision of a workplace transformed have many more mundane details to deal with. Still, rather than thinking in terms of technology focused details like a “cloud first” or “mobile first” strategy or on individual technologies like file sharing and enterprise social networks, Gartner’s argument is that you need to think bigger and keep in mind what you want to achieve.

Mann’s presentation on developing a digital workplace roadmap was a little less blue-sky than the keynote, but he still talked about starting with business objectives like faster onboarding of new employees or improving product development and “mapping back” to the enabling technologies.

Digital workplace is a business strategy, not a technical strategy like figuring out how to consolidate storage, he said. Therefore it requires business leadership, not just IT leadership. That leadership can come from many quarters, from the head of sales to the CEO. Some human resources executives have also taken an interest in moving beyond the mechanics of hiring and firing to a focus on developing employees and making them more effective.

The speed of change that digital workplace strategy seeks to address means that, in addition to having greater business agility as its goal, the strategy itself must be agile and adaptable. Even while coaching attendees on developing a “roadmap,” Mann cautioned, “it’s not going to be a roadmap in the sense of that it will give you every step along the way – it’s more like ‘here is the next waypoint.’“

Keep your eyes on the summit you’re seeking to climb.