Next Step in The Digital Workspace: Using Intelligence to Improve Data Delivery and Provide Insights

Data and the insights from it drive choices that enable success for a modern business. Every organization has put “data-driven” decision making on its list of corporate goals. However, when we break down what that lofty ambition requires, the scope of the problem becomes clear. Every employee needs insights and access to key data sets that improves their decision making. It’s not just for data scientists or dedicated business analysts. Yet most employees are not skilled in data extraction or creating analyses, or even downloading data from business systems.

Standing in the way of supporting the goal of data-driven decision making, is the difficulty of finding data and the key nuggets it contains. According to McKinsey Insights, employees spend 20% of their time looking for data. And it’s not their fault. The organization’s data warehouses, databases, and information repositories were never designed to support interactions with untrained users. And the stopgap measure of having knowledgeable IT teams act as a service resource to gather data can’t scale.

Then there is the issue of finding the salient points in the data. The idea of trying to make all employees data savants is a poor approach. Getting to actionable insights is critical. Some estimates indicate that data scientists spend 50% to 80% of their time wrangling data, before the data can be used for decision making. 

The only way to deliver actionable analyses and data at scale is to use technology with intelligence to automate both the acquisition and delivery of data and analyses to employees.

Providing employees with intelligent tools changes the game. The technology that enables this capability delivers a transformational change for the organization. Employees see massive productivity gains. For example, if the employee spends 20% of their time searching for data, and this is cut to 10%, the result is a gain of five full work weeks, or 200 hours, per year. And if insights are achieved more quickly, it reduces the time necessary to make key decisions, speeding up the entire organization. This is why Citrix Workspace has been enhanced with intelligent capabilities that enable delivering data and insights that empower employees. Solving the problem delivers incredible return. In addition, the beneficial impact on the employee experience is substantial.

Consistent delivery of this critical information is also essential to team alignment. If every member of the team is utilizing data in isolation and creating their own analyses independently, the odds of each of them coming to a consistent result is low. This results in collaboration roadblocks and time wasted trying to “group verify” results. It also impacts the ability to make the right decisions. Using one consistent platform can eliminate this negative scenario.

Using intelligence to drive insight and data delivery improves the entire ecosystem of the digital workspace. It is now possible for the digital workspace platform to align data, apps, and collaboration tools to streamline decision-making processes. Data can be put into the context of the apps that support creating conclusions. More importantly, different apps can be used on the same datasets adding new ways to make assessments from that information. This improves both productivity and the employee experience.

Learning and intelligence will also improve the quality of what is delivered to the workers.  As the system becomes more accurate and responsive, the value of it grows. This represents an important improvement in ROI that needs to be recognized. The longer firms wait to deploy this technology, the longer they may be at a competitive disadvantage.

Intelligent delivery of critical insights and information is a game-changing feature for digital workspaces that empowers employee decision-making. Citrix Workspace delivers this functionality and now addresses one of the single most impactful elements of business processes—the combination of data and insights to drive optimized conclusions. Citrix Workspace can now deliver true competitive advantage and create a very real distinction between the firms that use it and the ones that don’t.