Five key pillars of the modern workplace
Things have evolved from the once common industrial areas with large factories, where just a few managers were responsible for creativity and innovation, to an era of information where most workers are involved in knowledge-based work. Effective knowledge-based work requires easy access, the sharing of information, and easy collaboration, from anywhere. The pandemic shift to WFH and the requirement for companies to offer WFH has also increased the importance of the workplace. To create a modern workplace you need to consider five important pillars; creativity, teamwork, mobility, security and simplicity.
Any business that is going to transform requires investment, both in Technology with the right tools and Space to create the right environment, so that collaboration can take place among employees, and also the support of a Company Culture which is key to keeping the best people.
Modern Workplace Configurations
As a company, you could take a simple approach and say all users are equal from a modern workplace perspective, but this is not effective, not only from an economic perspective but also because security and productivity aspects play a major role in the need to categorize or profile users. Defining users upfront helps to define the technology, the policies and the procedures that need to be in place to run an effective (economic, secure, efficient & productive) IT support service in the modern workplace. Typical major categories of users can be:
When the different personas have been identified, the trick is to map those to technical persona types that reflect these users' technology, processes, and security requirements. Typical technology user types that NUDGEIT identifies and samples of the technology and process definitions are shown below.
Modern Workplace Licensing
Licensing for the modern workplace is a jungle that is really difficult to navigate. Most companies are over licensed in many areas, not utilizing what they pay for, and typically have more than one product from different vendors doing the same or capable of doing the same functionality. Many companies purchase Enterprise Mobility plus Security (EM+S) for the sole purpose of getting the self-service password reset, with writeback to the on-premise AD, but the same company also own Okta for Single Sign-on and using Airwatch for mobile device management, not realizing that the Microsoft licenses they have already deployed have similar or better functionality.
To select the right licensing, start with the categorization of the users and their needs - when that is done the matching of the software can start, and this is a balance between functionality, standardization, and cost optimization. This is not easy, the Enterprise Security and Mobility E5 license capabilities are shown below as an example of how much attention you need to pay to the details to get the optimal configuration. If you want some help in untangling your licensing for the modern workplace, we recommend starting with our Modern Workplace Licenses Assessment service, which is a quick solution at a fixed price.
