Time To Plan For 2023 Digital Office Investments
The tip of 2022 is quick approaching, and digital office professionals in every single place are beginning to plan their investments and technique for 2023. Right here at Forrester, we’ve been fielding dozens of consumer questions from digital office leaders in search of steerage on tips on how to put together for the approaching yr. With so many macro developments impacting tech decision-making — recessions, hybrid work, provide chain disruption, and extra — it’s clear that we’re in for an additional yr of serious change within the digital office. Earlier this yr, Forrester launched our strategic recommendation for the digital office, which we outline as:
The ecosystem of applied sciences that organizations deploy to allow a productive and safe digital worker expertise. The digital office consists of six core parts: core productiveness platforms, employee-facing HR instruments, an orchestration layer, expertise touchpoints, analytics, and software integration.
The place Will Innovation Happen In 2023?
In 2023, we’ll see enhancements to all six parts of the digital office. As we name out in our report, digital worker expertise (DEX) will stay a focus for digital office leaders as they try to make use of know-how to draw expertise, enhance productiveness, and promote worker engagement. Anticipate to see the next digital office developments:
Organizations will pursue tactical use circumstances to drive DEX ROI. Digital worker expertise has been a sizzling space for shoppers ever because the pandemic compelled workers dwelling, and it’s nonetheless essential. Sixty p.c of know-how and enterprise leaders point out that enhancing EX is a high IT precedence over the subsequent 12 months. Fears of an upcoming recession, nevertheless, will probably impression DEX funding in 2023, leading to longer and smaller offers. Why? Many leaders battle to outline the ROI of DEX investments immediately, which is able to make this class tougher to justify to CFOs. The end result? Enterprises should give attention to DEX use circumstances that cut back price and enhance expertise.Forrester’s recommendation: Double down on expertise funding. Forrester’s Planning Information 2023: Expertise Structure & Supply calls out continued funding in core enterprise functions and options that defend enterprise belongings and folks. Whereas others might pull again on DEX funding, that is the time to leapfrog your competitors. Tactical DEX enchancment use circumstances with tangible ROI — akin to proactive expertise administration — needs to be key focus areas.
Proactive expertise administration will turn out to be mainstream. Proactive approaches to expertise administration purpose to forestall expertise points from impacting workers. Importantly for leaders in 2023, they each enhance DEX and cut back prices. Forrester witnessed actual deployments of proactive IT support in 2022. For instance, CGI is utilizing AIOps and conversational AI to deflect 8,000 occasions a month. Proactivity will turn out to be extra mainstream in 2023 and can develop into new use circumstances akin to asset administration, gadget refresh, and break/repair.Forrester’s recommendation: Concentrate on constructing an correct information mannequin to faciliate proactivity. Proactivity is just doable with the precise information to tell actions. Information from end-user expertise administration (EUEM) platforms, endpoint administration instruments, and enterprise service administration distributors can successfully string collectively a number of sorts of information to realize proactivity. These are often ripe for proactive expertise remediation. What sorts of information do you want to accumulate in 2023 to facilitate proactive administration?
Vendor consolidation will happen throughout a number of digital office classes. 2022 noticed an acceleration of a pattern towards simplifying digital office portfolios. Microsoft Groups, for instance, added software and file help straight into the platform, whereas distributors akin to Appspace-Beezy and Poppulo-SmartSpace-FWI mixed forces to unify bodily and digital workspaces and endpoint administration distributors more and more constructed DEX capabilities straight into the platform. In 2023, count on to see better integration between EUEM and AIOps instruments, consolidation of visible collaboration instruments into broader suites, and integration of extra sensible workplace tooling into digital office choices.Forrester’s recommendation: Assess your present software stack now. Search for overlapping function units from a number of suppliers. Are there alternatives for simplification? May DEX enhance if workers accessed these capabilities from a single platform? Integrations that cut back context switching will particularly impression worker productiveness in optimistic methods.
Personalization will rise as a digital office requirement. Personalization has been a key pattern within the worker communications area since pre-pandemic instances however is now discovering its function within the digital office stack. Orchestration and viewers segmentation capabilities allow the supply of focused content material, information, apps, and notifications into most well-liked interfaces. These individualized experiences will be primarily based on the worker’s function, job stage, and even how they match into the anywhere-work spectrum of dwelling workplace, company workplace, or frequent traveler.Forrester’s recommendation: Equip totally different worker personas with their very own individualized digital workspaces — which Forrester defines as “the personalised and customizable set of apps, content material, and gadgets that make up a person’s productiveness expertise in response to their office persona.”
Digital office leaders will double down on new approaches to success metrics. Look ahead to extra cohesion across the numerous analytics and dashboards provided by totally different parts of the digital office. Basic engagement measurements (akin to content material views, e mail open charges, variety of contributors in a chat channel) or service-level settlement (SLA) measurements for software uptime, for instance, will shift into extra employee-centric “experience-level agreements” (XLAs). A few of these XLAs can be “SLA 2.0” — like PC boot time — however others will have in mind broader worker journeys — like onboarding.Forrester’s recommendation: Outline success primarily based on worker outcomes, not on simply IT efficiencies or the info that’s best to report on. Measure worker satisfaction on an ongoing foundation and benchmark real-time human experiences — not the efficiency of servers or apps.
Want Assist With Your Technique?
In the event you’d prefer to be taught extra about tips on how to construct a digital office technique, shoppers can entry our latest report and recorded webinar, or attain out to Andrew and Cheryl at [email protected].
