© 2018 NTT DATA, Inc. All rights reserved.

Optimize the Digital Workplace in Seven Pragmatic Steps

DECEMBER 2018

WHITE PAPER | DYNAMIC WORKPLACE SERVICES

Author

Dan Chalk | Senior Director, Strategic Solutions | NTT DATA Services

Connect With Our Expert:

Dan.Chalk@nttdata.com

Table of Contents

Brand IT as an enabler 4

Forget about the toys 4

Institutionalize “perceived self-healing” 5

Conclusion 6

Allow users to self-define 5

Focus on performance metrics that matter 4

Harness user experience analytics 5

Let users seek help in the ways that suit them 6

Introduction 3

A new approach to IT: Seven recommendations for change

7 About the author

NTT DATA Services White Paper | Optimize the Digital Workplace in Seven Pragmatic Steps

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Today’s workplace is undergoing a profound transformation. It’s now connected, flexible and agile. Driven by a significantly shorter innovation cycle, today’s workforce sees digital and social as enablers of collaborative working rather than distinct technologies. They expect a work experience that’s consistent with their personal lives — choice, mobility, self-service and anytime access are paramount.

IT departments need a new mindset to adapt to these requirements. In the digital workplace, the role of IT should be facilitating the many ways users consume and manage information. Users need the best systems, applications and data as they seek to generate value for

customers. Yet at most organizations, users don’t see IT as a facilitator. Instead, they regard the department, at best, as the team that keeps the systems running — and, at worst, as restrictive and controlling.

There are good reasons for these perceptions. Most IT functions evolved during the baby-boom era, when IT was viewed as a cost center that sought control of technology to better serve the company’s leadership strategy. And now many IT leaders are unable to articulate the department’s broader value — focusing instead on technology.

This approach is increasingly obsolete at today’s organizations, where Generation X workers have moved into leadership and decision-making roles. These new leaders are rejecting the command and control model in favor of individualism and entrepreneurship. And millennials, who are fully digital, are even more self-driven.

By 2020, the greatest

source of competitive

advantage for 30% of

organizations will come

from the workforce’s

ability to creatively exploit

digital technologies.1

—Gartner

Introduction

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© 2018 NTT DATA, Inc. All rights reserved.

By 2020, organizations that support a “choose-your-own-work-style” culture will boost employee retention rates by more than 10%.2

—Gartner

A new approach to IT: Seven recommendations for changeIf business users see IT as a partner in, rather than a barrier to, rapid progress, they’re more likely to embrace a collaborative technology approach. But IT must demonstrate that it can be adaptable and quick to respond. So, for IT functions prepared to embrace the philosophies of the digital generations — Gen-X, millennials and beyond — it’s not too late to earn a strategic seat at the table in the digital workplace. To make that shift successfully, the department must embrace the following seven imperatives.

1. Brand IT as an enabler

Too often, IT is a roadblock to the effectiveness and creativity of business colleagues. The department’s instinct is to control the ways in which people work; to embrace new ways of working slowly and cautiously, following a long period of testing; and to rely on outdated structures of authority and hierarchy. Now, however, IT must make a proactive shift to a model in which the department automatically facilitates the ambitions of the organization, rather than setting rules about what’s allowed.

The challenge is for IT to take a leadership position in the organization. By identifying and proposing opportunities for technology, IT can help the organization that secures better outcomes from strategic priorities, rather than waiting to be included.

In this regard, IT leaders must learn to be less restrictive. One inspirational model is the mobile phone industry, where carriers have ceded almost total control to consumers, who decide for themselves which devices they want to use and which services they want on those devices. The carrier’s role is to deliver a platform that enables and supports those user choices.

2. Forget about the toys

When IT leaders get excited about emerging technologies, they overlook the fact that most of their users aren’t interested in tools for their own sake. Rather, they want to know what better outcomes these tools will provide. Technological innovation isn’t the objective; it’s a means to achieve a business goal or overarching vision.

IT must embrace the customer-centric model to which so many organizations are attempting to shift. This means the department must work with its business partners to understand what each wants to achieve. IT must then identify the tools and technologies that will deliver the desired outcomes — rather than presenting users with technical solutions to problems they haven’t complained about.

3. Focus on performance metrics that matter

Frequently, the IT department’s proudest accomplishments are comparatively unimportant to the rest of the organization. While users undoubtedly want problems quickly fixed, they would be happier to avoid these problems in the first place.

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In the digital marketplace, IT delivers the greatest value as an enabler of strategic business outcomes. The metrics that matter to business users provide intelligence on the speed and agility of the IT function, the department’s capabilities in supporting change, and the value it’s able to drive to the end customer and/or supply chain.

Where once the department sought to resolve a user’s problems with just one call, a strategy intended to deliver agentless resolution will drive a shift to technologies such as cognitive computing and automation.

4. Allow users to self-define

The mobile phone carrier example is instructive here. To shed traditional ways of working, the IT department should hand more control to business users. This requires IT to implement device-agnostic and increasingly mobile access plans across multiple channels, from traditional PCs to bring-your-own-device models. The department should also avoid strict adherence to traditional Windows-based functionality, instead promoting and enabling alternatives where appropriate.

Proactive IT functions monitor user behaviors and consumption to make prescriptive recommendations about how users might work more effectively in the future.

IT leaders naturally worry about the security implications of ceding control in these ways, but self-definition and cyber-resilience aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s important for the department to work with users and encourage them to take an active role in risk management and mitigation.

5. Harness user experience analytics

Data and analytics tools help IT understand how users employ the organization’s infrastructure, systems and applications — taking proactive steps to improve service.

For example, IT can identify the most over- or under-utilized resources. With this information, the department can recommend where upgrades and downgrades are appropriate to address budgetary constraints and performance requirements. IT can also identify service incidents in real time, and either resolve the incidents automatically or provide the workforce with intuitive self-help tools that allow users to resolve incidents directly.

It’s important to recognize that IT innovation may come from process improvement or environmental customizations, rather than development or acquisition of brand-new tools.

6. Institutionalize “perceived self-healing”

Self-healing systems are designed to manage themselves — they monitor the quality of the user’s experience, discover potential failures and take corrective action without inconveniencing users — making it attractive to both IT and users.

Through continuous service improvement, IT will be able to provide a holistic view of the user environment to monitor trends and identify patterns. This enables the department to collaborate with business partners in a frictionless manner to optimize and industrialize the process. It also improves operations and supports the business case for the introduction of more advanced capabilities in the future, once the need for cognitive computing and machine learning is clear.

Such perceived self-healing will be a natural fit with optimized self-support based on partial automation or knowledge. Preemptive contact is also part of this solution, with a virtual or human agent reaching out to users before a failure occurs.

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© 2018 NTT DATA, Inc. All rights reserved.

ConclusionThese seven imperatives provide a pragmatic framework for implementing a modern workplace environment and redefining the relationship between IT and its users — shifting the department from a control model to a strategic partnership model.

The most appropriate steps will vary from workplace to workplace, but they might include:

• Allowing users a choice of support channels, device type and access method• Establishing a holistic, single source of truth for sentiment, environmental, performance and utilization data that’s

available for all to see• Using this centralized truth to drive partnership decision-making for:

» Resource consumption and capacity planning activities » Assessment of the potential value of new tool or process efficiencies » Implementation of self-healing and/or proactive agent engagement, whether virtual or human

To take these steps, the IT department needs to undertake a significant change of mindset — to accept that in the digital workplace, the era of controlling the organization’s IT environment is over. Those departments prepared to take the leap will find that working with business users in a more collaborative fashion is liberating and fulfilling, with IT leaders moving closer to the business than ever before.

7. Let users seek help in the ways that suit them

IT doesn’t always know best. Different users want help in different ways at different times. Some may want traditional voice calls. Others might prefer self-help or mobile support channels like chat, virtual agents or social media — which remain largely untapped in corporate IT.

Be prepared to embrace all options. Enabling human operators to deliver both voice and chat support is relatively simple technically. Internal social media platforms also offer potential, with the possibility of creating a crowdsourced pool of knowledge available to all users and with or without the guidance of an agent.

Virtual agents can play a significant role in improving customer satisfaction ratings. Business use cases for virtual agents are increasingly entering mainstream markets. Previously, relatively immature iterations of this technology hampered adoption due to a lack of quantifiable return on investment, either in-house or as an outsourced service. But now there are real advantages; virtual agents offer flexible capacity, consistent quality and continuous improvement, freeing up human agents to deal with more complex use cases.

For these reasons, virtual agents will increasingly become part of IT, just as other operations functions have adopted this technology. High-volume, low-variety tasks — for example, password resets — provide a ready source of work for virtual agents.

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Sources

Visit nttdataservices.com to learn more.NTT DATA Services partners with clients to navigate and simplify the modern complexities of business and technology, delivering the insights, solutions and outcomes that matter most. As a division of NTT DATA Corporation, a top 10 global IT services and consulting provider, we wrap deep industry expertise around a comprehensive portfolio of infrastructure, applications and business process services.

© 2018 NTT DATA, Inc. All rights reserved. 0000112018 | 324650-Dynamic-Workplace-Services-Whitepaper.indd | Rev. 1.0

1. Gartner, Inc.: How to Market and Sell Digital Workplace Solutions, Craig Roth, February 2018.

2. Gartner, Inc.: Crafting Workspaces that Enhance the Employee Experience, Carol Rozwell and Achint Aggarwal, December 2017.

About the author

Let’s get startedSee what NTT DATA can do for you.

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Dan Chalk Senior Director, Strategic Solutions, NTT DATA Services

In his nearly 40-year career, Dan has used his broad industry experience to help clients more quickly adopt innovative solutions. However, this expectation alone is not unique as modern IT success is irrevocably measured in business value delivered. Dan has most recently held a variety of senior leadership roles focused on portfolio strategy and client transformation enablement.