Digitalization requires a workplace with modern equipment. As the study "The digital workplace in Swiss companies" by MSM Research shows, the fixed workplace is becoming less and less important. Cloud services are regarded as the actual enablers for the next digital evolutionary stage.
The business age of the next stage of digital evolution (so-called digitalization) demands a modern workplace with the appropriate equipment, technologies, and solutions. Here, everything revolves around speed, response times, innovation and agility. With its solutions and technologies, the Workplace, which is seamlessly embedded into digital business processes without media interruption, provides the necessary freedom of action and movement for employees. This Workplace determines successful and smooth cooperation and communication between teams and ultimately between the entire company.
The fixed workplace disappears
In the course of this development, the fixed-job will become less and less important the longer it lasts. According to our new study "The digital workplace in Swiss companies", the fixed workplace model can still be found in around 25 percent of companies today. However, this share will fall to just under 12 percent over the next three years. By 2022, flexible and mobile working will have become established in well over 40 percent of the companies surveyed and will largely become an integral part of everyday working life. The purely fixed workplace has an expiration date.
The modern workplace in the increasingly digital world offers the possibility of accessing information and applications independent of time and place, which has a great influence on the organization, processes, and culture of companies. This workplace should be flexible and innovative in terms of applications, mobility and security, and able to adapt quickly to changes within the organization and the market. A smart workplace environment (infrastructure, operations, and applications) is the basis and backbone of any digitization strategy and its operational implementation.
Cloud services as enablers
With a view to the operation of workstation environments and infrastructures, cloud services are now regarded as the actual enablers for the next digital evolution stage towards innovative, smart workplaces. They provide rapidly deployable capabilities that greatly simplify and accelerate collaboration and lead to rapidly measurable improvements. This central importance of modern and flexible workstations is also reflected in the budgets and projects planned by companies for the current year. Around 35 percent of companies are increasing their expenditure on workstations. This is despite the current general reluctance to invest due to global economic and political upheavals and uncertainties. Overall, we expect expenditure in the Workplaces and Mobile Computing segments to grow by more than 9 percent. Almost one in three Swiss francs of the external expenditure of Swiss companies is thus spent on computers, mobile devices, smartphones, solutions and services for workplace equipment.
Reducing the smart workplace and its successful embedding in today's working environments to the use of technology alone would be too short-sighted. The decisive factor remains natural intelligence: the human being. And the willingness to make the leap from a traditional, classic working environment into a new, agile and flexible Workplace and Workspace world.
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This article was published in netzwoche.ch