This is the second blog in a series for The Digital Workspace Checklist, a new whitepaper from industry analyst Ovum. Read the first and third blogs here. Access the full checklist here.
A workspace that scales to meet real enterprise requirements: identities, roles, devices, applications and data.
The consumerization of enterprise IT continues to spread throughout the workplace, with employees often having to service their own IT needs as IT departments focus on patching, protecting and upgrading technology that was conceived in a different era. So, while IT departments are primarily concerned with technologies from the past, employees use technology from the present (and often it seems from the future) to get work done.
Employee-owned smartphones and tablets are in use within most organizations, as are apps and consumer-oriented cloud services. Accommodating and managing these technologies at enterprise scale and across enterprise dimensions is a challenge that would stretch any IT department, but it is essential that they do so for the business to remain progressive.
It is also important for organizations to design and promote a digital working environment that maintains employee engagement and encourages productive, efficient ways of working. Without this, output will fall, costs will rise and business growth will stall, i.e. the opposite of what businesses want (see below figure). But enterprise IT involves thinking about issues that extend well beyond the individual employee and their immediate requirements.
Business continuity, security, identity, cost management, interoperability, service and support are just some of the factors that need constant attention due to their broad implications across all aspects of the business. The old saying of “a problem shared is a problem halved” has real significance in the world of corporate IT, as many of the problems and issues being faced by CIOs are not unique to their situation.
System integrators and outsourcers can use their own scale (they generally employ a very large workforce that is geographically dispersed and apt to work under a variety of security and governance regimes) to target and resolve common issues relating to the digital workspace. Their handling of IT vendor and service provider relationships can also free up scarce enterprise resource that can be redeployed to address more specific business challenges.
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