Over the last several months, organizations have been adapting their IT environments to accommodate a distributed workforce. Getting this right is a huge task and accomplishment in its own right.
However, organizations and IT leaders are now beginning to think about what happens next, after they become comfortable supporting their distributed workforce. How will the business change?
Technology—especially employee-facing EUC environments—is going to play a big role in preparing for this next phase.
On Thursday, August 6, VMware COO Sanjay Poonen will join NTT DATA for a live webinar to discuss these issues in the context of the financial services and insurance industries. Here are all of the details:
• “How to Maximize Your Distributed Workforce Strategy,” presented by NTT Data
• Panelists: Sanjay Poonen, COO, VMware; Meredith Chavel, CIO, Markit Digital, IHS Markit; Wayne Busch, President, Financial Services, Insurance & Consulting, NTT DATA; and Lisa Woodley, VP, Customers Experience, NTT.
• Thursday, August 6, 2020
• 12:30 pm PDT | 3:30 pm EDT
• Length: 60 Minutes
• Click here for more details and registration.
The opportunities that come next
Many organizations spent the early part of 2020 figuring out how to rapidly enable remote work, a phase that we have referred to as “React.” After they got everybody safely into their new arrangements, it was then time to optimize these environments and make them run more smoothly, a phase we call “Reflect.”
Almost all organizations are in the Reflect phase right now, but it’s a good time to start thinking about the next phase, which we call “Rethink.” This phase is clearly going to have a big effect on EUC—possibly even bigger than the first two stages.
There are plenty of first-order technical effects that we can foresee in this phase. Remote onboarding workflows, zero-touch device provisioning, cloud-based modern management, zero-trust architectures, and support for all sorts of devices and collaboration technologies are going to become the standard approach to EUC. For those of us that have been around EUC for more than a few years, these new environments will be a site to behold.
But, for as big of a change as these first-order effects will be, let’s turn to look at the second-order effects.
A lot of people have already pointed out the more equal opportunities that will arise from being able to hire people no matter their location. This will subsequently result in a more diverse user population, which will affect how IT delivers the end user computing environment. In fact, the it won’t just be the IT product that changes—the very IT department itself will also change. There will be some big opportunities here.
Now let’s look at this from yet another angle. Financial services and insurance companies often have employees in retail locations. Clearly, the face of retail—and the way that consumers approach it—is also changing. If we thought going from fixed desks and PCs to roaming mobile devices was a big shift, this will mark an even greater magnitude of change for customer experience.
The changing customer experience will then feed back on the cycle of the changing employee experience, which will in turn influence changes in how we deliver IT and EUC environments.
Where is this all going? There are some tremendous opportunities for growth and development. However, all of this is predicated on having a technology platform that can adapt to support all these changes.
Final thoughts
These are all themes that Sanjay and NTT Data will be talking about August 6. As you can tell, I believe that it’s super interesting to think about where all of this will go. Also, as I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, prior to being COO, Sanjay Poonen had a background in EUC, so I’m sure this will be an interesting conversation with plenty of good thoughts for anyone that likes to think about the future of EUC. Please join us on August 6!
