New “born in the cloud” companies have it EASY! If I was to start a company today, it would be relatively simply (and fast) to choose business platforms, applications, and endpoints. While in reality, businesses have years of technology investments and business processes. So while companies are seeing the benefits and value of a digital workplace strategy, they risk creating a substantial functionality deficit.
ESG sees businesses drive cloud-first digital workspace strategies to embrace these opportunities:
- Empower employees with the newest devices and choice.
- Empower employees with cloud-native, secure-by-design products (apps and devices).
- Lower costs, simplify operations, reduce security risks, and decrease downtime.
- Provide secure access to authorized apps, legacy software, and other resources employees need to get the job done…from anywhere.
but…
- Digital workspace technology strategies can make or break the employee experience.
- A company’s approach to digital workspaces can have a negative impact on the company culture and break business processes.
- IT executives, CXOs, etc., need to move fast (within a 12-month window) and iterate frequently.
- The security perimeter has evaporated.
Embracing a digital workspace strategy is good. Risking employee experience, security, and application functionality is bad. Obviously. So, in the interim as the velocity of digital workspace adoption builds, companies can race ahead with all the great benefits but they also have to send some applications into a holding pattern. Here’s why.
It’s very common for companies to try to leap forward and try to modernize an application. IT project managers meet, they create requirements, send off the requirements to an outsourced development resource, and weeks (even months) later they get an application with 80% of the functionality and it’s missing key design elements. Yikes, that isn’t very valuable to anyone but it is all too common.
As businesses use cloud and digital transformation initiatives as a catalyst for digital workspaces, there are alternative means to keep momentum without the unintended consequences. As part of an application transformation, businesses can package and project legacy applications to a modern digital workspace experience. This method is very common with Microsoft Windows applications as we covered in the ESG blog Microsoft Windows Is Just an App.
Stay tuned in as ESG explores the different approaches and technology businesses may use to accelerate adoption of workspaces with predictable results.
