2020 Vision

 

Archana Sridhar

Senior Manager, Business Development, SMART Workspace, Sogeti

 

 

My career background is firmly in the end user space. It’s an exciting area to be working in at the moment because it’s seeing rapid evolution as we move towards what Sogeti calls the SMART Workspace.

Some 17 years ago when I started out in this area, business development around end user needs was largely for Help Desk solutions and services. Several years ago, there was a big focus on cloud, and now we’re seeing DevOps and artificial intelligence (AI) coming to the fore as organizations move to a more agile way of working. This agility goes hand-in-hand with speed – the more agile you are, the faster you can respond and get new products and services to market quickly.

Speed is thus part of the new world of IT. The rate of change is accelerating. We must all evolve, but now we need to change faster than ever. Instead of every few years, we’re now talking about releasing new applications and product updates every month, or even weeks. I thrive in this world and enjoy the challenge of coming out with new solutions that help our clients do more, such as our SMART Workspace. I’m increasingly seeing clients looking at how they can optimize their operations with new technology, for example with chatbots. Others are starting their SMART Workspace journeys with Windows 10 projects or Microsoft O365 implementations to enable greater collaboration.

At Sogeti, one of the questions we help our clients answer is how to convert these technologies into productivity. In fact, heightened productivity is one of the key outcomes of the SMART Workspace. Enabling people to work from anywhere, at any time, on any device, is clearly going to bring a boost in productivity. And, as more and more employees demand to be able to work remotely, or from any room in the workplace, the modern enterprise will have to adapt.

My 2020 vision is of a dynamic workplace, where employee happiness (a new measure of business success) is determined by such things as the tools people are given to collaborate with and whether they can contribute to the business from anywhere. This latter point is interesting as the battle for talent intensifies. Being able to draw on a geographically dispersed talent pool without the need for them to be in a physical office will become important going forwards. The cost saving and real estate implications of this alone will be a driving force in the decisions shaping tomorrow’s workplace.