Don’t Neglect These 5 Things for Your Digital Workplace

Enterprises that deliver the best digital workplace have superior top and bottom line results. Here are some of the trends that are driving digital workplaces and digital transformation:

• Consumerization of IT: People want to use tools they are familiar with. And they want the same kind of performance they get in their everyday lives – they don’t want something slow and old.
• Speed of digital innovation: Businesses must continuously find ways to make employees more productive and reduce the time-to-market of products and services
• Work isn’t a location, it’s an activity: Businesses can keep employees engaged by adopting on-demand environments that support employees whenever, wherever, and however they want to work

Great user experience is essential to this digital transformation and the growth of the digital workplace. End-user experience and performance are critical to enhance productivity, increase employee satisfaction and attract/retain the best talent. Unfortunately, most organizations neglect to empower IT with the right tools to assure the success of these workplace transformations.

As an IT pro, what can you do to make sure you have the right tools? If you’re expecting your current tools to do the trick, or that such tools are available for free, you’re in for a big surprise. Here’s the five things you’ll need from these tools so your digital workplace transformation is a success:

1. Benchmarking

To maintain a great user experience or improve a poor one, it’s critical to know what’s normal and how this compares to others. You might have the greatest team collaboration site ever built, but if its radically slower than your competitors, user adoption suffers, and you’ll miss your goals. You’ll need tools that can instantly deliver benchmarks to know how you stack up and what to improve.

2. Monitoring

Most workplace cloud apps are hybrid and depend on on-premise infrastructure and end to end networking. Legacy monitoring tools and your providers’ dashboards don’t monitor user experience. You’ll need tools built from the ground up to monitor user experience end to end.

3. Reporting

By monitoring your users experience and how this compares to your competitors, you can easily report these KPI. KPI such as the actual time it takes get things done: sending a message, sharing a document, signing in to CRM, viewing a dashboard, etc. You’ll need tools with management dashboards that report user experience KPI’s.

4. Fewer Incidents

It’s not enough to have great incident management tools. What matters is to reduce the number of incidents. With benchmarking, monitoring, and reporting you’ll transform IT from being reactive to being proactive. That way you’ll know about problems before they affect users so you can avoid them. You’ll need tools designed for pro-active incident management.

5. Faster resolutions

When stuff does happen, faster isolation leads to faster resolution and quicker Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR).  You won’t be able to resolve everything, but you won’t waste time troubleshooting when you know it’s your provider. The same benchmarking data that is so valuable with Exoprise CloudReady, the power of the crowd, enables you to isolate faster and know when everyone is experiencing a problem. And when its not happening for everyone, you will be able to do something like fixing your SSO, or escalating to your network team. You’ll need tools that instantly isolate problems end to end.

Microsoft Is Enabling the Most Advanced Digital Workplace With Office 365

There’s a clear winner in the marketplace for the most dynamic digital workplace and its Microsoft Office 365. There’s reasons why its winning when it comes to redefining the way business works today:

1. Evolving with the times – Microsoft has a clear roadmap for Office 365. What started as a business productivity bundle is now a full-fledged modern workplace suite.
2. Cloud First Strategy – Every workload is cloud-enabled and follows industry-standard security guidelines.
3. Comprehensive Approach – Office 365 provides a simpler and more direct means of getting things done.
4. Integrated Model – Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and more.
5. Do more with less – Office 365 provides a suite of applications to take care of planning and work management needs, document management, workflow management, unified voice communication, integrated messaging, and email—all under a single access management system that integrates well with your Active Directory. As a result, your organization doesn’t have to build or procure applications for every need that arises.

Failure is Not an Option

If failure is not an option for your digital workplace transformation, don’t neglect budgeting for and implementing the right tools. The good news is Exoprise CloudReady delivers all the above and more. CloudReady is incredibly easy to try, buy and use. You’ll be up & running in just a few minutes getting instant IT benchmarks from the Exoprise Crowd. You’ll have powerful dashboards and reports right out of the box. Plus, CloudReady will even automatically configure KPI’s for alerting & reporting. Your boss and CIO are going to love that! Don’t procrastinate, try it now!