ISG Provider Lens™ Digital Workplace of the Future - Global 2019-20 - Managed Services - Workplace Support
Digital Workplace of the Future: Dawn of Microsoft Technology and the XLA-Dominated Workplace
The workplace environment is under rapid transformation. Multiple factors challenge large enterprise clients and reassess their workplace strategies in present times. The most prominent challenge is a talent shortage and the related need to reskill and upskill existing staff. While there is a talented workforce out there in the market, the new, younger workers are tech savvy and it is imperative for enterprises to modernize their workplaces to be able to attract fresh relevant talent.
In multiple interactions with industry experts, we learned that younger workers often don’t join a company even after accepting their offer letters. The reason is tech savvy users can get feedback about the firm’s working culture through social media, and can rethink their decisions. Enterprises need to consider developing a positive image about their workplace environment for existing employees, so that they can spread favorable feedback in public forums. Technology can help immensely in enabling that positive image among employees, the end users.
Modern technologies enable enterprise IT to not only provide employees a favorable user experience with their applications and devices, but also to assess their sentiment and working patterns through data analytics. These analytics can generate many possible outcomes that can be useful for multiple enterprise business functions. Managing and monitoring the end-user experience is increasingly becoming a topic of interest among enterprises and their IT departments. Eventually it is affecting how the vendors and service providers hired by the enterprises are managing end user computing in a digital workplace environment.
ISG’s recently released “Creating the Workplace of the Future” report found that many enterprises still look to managed service providers as a source of labor arbitrage or specific time-and-material resources – not as valuable sources of innovation or transformation. In fact, most traditional contract structures fail to support strategic engagement. Traditional contracts use service-level agreements (SLAs) as the key metric. Typical SLAs used require careful governance but do not support strategic engagement.
A modern outlook towards digital workplace require service contracts that measure service provider performance as per measurable end-user experience, using experience level agreements (XLAs). There is a growing interest in XLA-based contracts, although wide acceptability has not been observed, as both clients and service providers are still figuring out best way to structure XLAs. In essence, continuously monitoring system, network, device and application performance can generate analytics that can provide an indication of the prevalent overall end-user experience level with enterprise IT. Leveraging machine learning, data analytics, sentiment analysis and cognitive intelligence can provide significant improvements in the way enterprise end users consume IT services. Many service providers are developing analytics offerings that are personalized around end users to provide the most appropriate actionable insight for enterprise business functions.
Apart from XLAs, another important trend that we are witnessing in the market is the dominance of Microsoft tools and technologies in the workplace environment. Microsoft had always been the de facto technology solution vendor for the workplace, be it operating systems, servers, productivity applications or system configurators. However, with cloud and SaaS applications entering into the workplace, easier and less costly alternatives to traditional Microsoft resources are available. To counter this competition, Microsoft introduced a number of innovative solutions, including the Office 365 cloud-based office productivity suite, Windows10, an omni-device operating system that can support cloud apps, the Intune cloud-based mobile device management solution and the recently announced Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD). These successive steps by Microsoft brought large enterprises back to the Microsoft technology ecosystem. These enterprises are now looking for solution partners and vendors that can enable the latest Microsoft Office 365, Windows 10 enabled workplace environment and manage it. Microsoft is further strengthening its grip on the market by introducing subscription services like Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Managed Desktop. Leading service providers in digital workplace services are developing their offering around these technologies to support upcoming client requirements.
The state of digital workplace of the future services at the moment is Microsoft technology focused and XLA oriented. Different services have their own set of trends and updates.
Digital Workplace Consulting
Workplace consulting is as important as ever. Though some enterprises do not consider their managed service provider as a consulting partner, almost all leading global service providers are developing consulting capabilities on top of their managed services offering.
Consulting capabilities involve not just advisory on end-user persona segmentation and as-is workplace assessment, but also for measuring technology adoption and supporting change management.
Visionary service providers are considering further enhancing their consulting capabilities to include elements of digital dexterity measurement for end users and to extend their managed services scope beyond being enterprise IT centric.
Managed Services – Workplace and Mobility Support
With the advent of XLAs, almost all service providers are building capabilities to measure user experience based on technology usage at the minimum. How the providers define and what they measure as part of end-user experience is increasingly becoming a differentiating factor for service providers.
The growing scope of intelligent automation and cognitive intelligence is opening new doors and unexplored areas to improve end user experience by having a bot or virtual agent act as personal digital secretary, or in some cases, a digital twin of the end user.
There is a huge interest in smart workspace, meeting rooms and intelligent physical campuses. Service providers are investing in these capabilities by partnering with IoT solution vendors.
Augmented and virtual reality technologies continue to be explored for onsite field support.
In mobility, there is a growing interest in moving to a leading enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution vendor like Microsoft, which offers Intune. Service providers are developing offerings to enable the migration.
On the device analytics front, zero-touch Windows 10 migration and application readiness services are significant areas of interest for service providers.
Workplace services clients are seeing value in the device-as-a-service model. Clients do not want to own the hardware and are asking managed service providers to take care of device lifecycle management along with associated device app provisioning and security.
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)
UCaaS is a cloud-focused technology and is susceptible to quick evolution. Large enterprise and mid-market customers have fast-tracked their migration from on-premise and legacy solutions to pure cloud solutions. The biggest shift in the UCaaS marketplace has come because of the improving digital dexterity of end users. It is not just business leaders, but end users themselves who are also looking for new ways to automate the routine tasks associated with communication and collaboration.
The need for a more streamlined workflow has given rise to technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), automated speech recognition (ASR), natural language processing (NLP) and smart assistants in the workplace. Voice-driven artificial intelligence has been the major highlight in the UCaaS segment, and most of the leaders have started to develop solutions around it for their clients. Some of the leaders provide solutions that enable users to take call notes, record action items and schedule meetings by using an omnipresent smart assistant. AI also brings sentiment analysis into the picture, which involves data mining to determine opinions in speech or written text.
While newer technologies are disrupting the UCaaS space, the fact remains that cloud has been the biggest driver of change in this industry. Unified communications delivered as a service through the cloud allows for greater scalability, better mobility, more predictable operating expenses and a more seamless and consistent communication and collaboration experience.
Unified Endpoint Management (UEM)
With the proliferation of different devices and applications, device management has evolved from being device centric to encompassing enterprise mobility management (EMM). UEM offers a culmination of PC device management, mobile device management (MDM) and enterprise mobility management. Many EMM and MDM solution vendors are focusing on offering a holistic, unified endpoint management solution. Many security service providers are also providing unified solutions to manage the different endpoints used to access the workplace environment.
A unified approach to managing different devices and endpoints is in demand. It requires centralized solutions for all devices, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, Macs and smart IoT devices. Because of enterprise IT’s requirement to manage all devices from one solution and end users’ expectations for self-service, UEM solutions are expected to provide end-user self-service, desktop and PC lifecycle management plus endpoint mobility management.
Technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning can monitor traffic at each endpoint and recognize threats in the device ecosystem. Only issues that are not being automatically resolved will be escalated to human agents.